Read Online Almost Heaven by Chris Fabry - Free Book Online

mines.”
    We sat there awhile. It was good to hear my mother’s voice talk about the past. I don’t know how she got the strength to do it, and that strength wasn’t there much after that.
    â€œI remember the day the man came to our door and you cried,” I said.
    She closed her eyes and I could tell that memory hurt the worst. “He was coming home in another week. He’d almost made it through his first tour when a sniper fired from the trees. Hit him in the head. They tried to get him to the hospital, but the man said he was killed instantly. Just there one minute and gone the next.”
    â€œAnd Daddy felt like it was his fault?”
    â€œHe bawled like a baby at the funeral and just couldn’t shake the fact that he’d been the one to push him. He was like a zombie for weeks.”
    â€œWhat brought him out of it?”
    She looked at me and smiled. “You did.”
    â€œMe? How?”
    â€œThe mandolin. He came in one day from work, all covered up with the coal dust, and took a shower. And he was headed to bed without eating a bite when he heard you playing the mandolin in your room. Just picking out some song they had played in their group. He hadn’t been with his friends since Harless died, even though I told him he should invite them over. He stood there listening, and then his shoulders shook and I thought he was having a nervous breakdown.
    â€œâ€˜I’m sorry; I’m sorry,’ he kept saying. I told him it was all right, that everything was going to be okay. And the next week he had his friends back over and there was music in the house. You were sitting right there in the middle of them. That’s what pulled him out of it. You and the music.”
    Mama put her arm around me and snuggled close. “Your daddy always said that God had given you a great gift. He said he could hear the Lord pass just listening to the sounds that instrument could make.”
    â€œIs that what you think?” I said.
    â€œMore than ever,” she said. “The Lord has given you something special, Billy. But it’s not really your talent.”
    â€œWhat do you mean?”
    â€œThe people you read about in the Bible who are the special people aren’t really all that special. They’re just sinful people like you and me. What makes them special is the Lord himself. He delights in using the weak things and the despised things and things the world doesn’t have much time to notice.”
    â€œLike coal miners and their families.”
    She hugged me tighter. “Especially coal miners and their families. I think God has something special in mind for you. I don’t know what it is. I don’t know where he’s going to lead you, but I know God is going to work in you and through you.”
    I wanted to tell her about the day of the flood and how I hadn’t jumped, but I just said, “What makes you so sure?”
    â€œBecause I don’t think God trusts just anybody with so much heartache. The world has not yet seen what God can do with a man who gives both halves of a broken heart to him. And I don’t doubt that a man like that can change the world . . . or at least a little part of it.”
    Mama and I never talked much about Harless and Daddy after that, except in her final days that were even more of a heartache. But after that day, I was determined to be the man she was talking about. I wanted to be the one with the broken heart God would use. I didn’t have any idea how he would do that, of course. It took me a long time to realize what was right in front of me.

5

    Time hinders the human condition, but it does not touch me. With our Creator, one day is like a thousand years and a thousand years a day. We feel the onslaught of time only as it is experienced by those in our charge. To us it is only a discipline. Time holds no sway, has no bearing on our resolve to achieve our assigned