CARRYING US BACK TO OUR ROOM
In a home of which I know, a little boy, the only son, was ill with an incurable disease. Month after month, the mother had tenderly nursed him, read to him and played with him, hoping to keep him from the dreadful finality of the doctor's diagnosis...the little boy was sure to die. But as the weeks went on, he gradually began to understand that he would never be like the other boys he saw playing outside his window. Small as he was, he began to understand the meaning of the term "death", and he too knew was to die.
One day his mother had been reading to him the stirring tale of King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table...and about the last glorious battle where so many fair knights met their death. She closed the book and her son sat silent for a moment, deeply stirred. Then he asked his question, "Mama, what is it like to die? Mama, does it hurt?" Quick tears sprang to her eyes, and she hurried to the kitchen, supposedly to tend to something on the stove. She knew it was a question with deep significance and that it must be answered satisfactorily. She paused for a moment and breathed a hurried prayer that the Lord would keep her from breaking down before her son and that she would be able to give him an answer.
The Lord gave her inspiration. She returned to her son and said, "Kenneth, do you remember when you were a tiny boy how you used to play so hard all day that when night came you were too tired even to undress, and you'd tumble into my bed and fall asleep? That was not your bed; it was not where you belonged. You would only stay there a little while, and much to your surprise you would wake up and find yourself in your own bed in your own room. You were there because someone who loved you had taken care of you. Your father had come with big strong arms and carried you away. Kenneth, darling, death is just like that. We just wake up one morning to find ourselves in the other room--our room where we belong, because the Lord Jesus loves us enough to die for us." The boy's shining face looking up into hers told her that the point had been made. Kenneth never questioned again.
Several weeks later, he fell asleep just as she had said, and the Father's big, strong arms carried him to his own room.
"I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever... I will come back and take you to be with me that you also may be where I am." Jesus' nailed scarred hands will take us home.