Almost Heaven

WHEN THE MEANING FINDS YOU:

I attended a neighborhood party recently with people from many countries, cultures, races, languages, and faiths. They were bright people, educated people, interesting people—the sort who make you aware that the world is both much larger than you imagined and somehow small enough to fit around one crowded dinner table.

I came home richer for the conversation, the laughter, and especially the food. Those people know how to feast. If the kingdom of heaven is anything like one of their neighborhood parties, no one will leave hungry, and somebody will insist you take another plate home.

Near the end of the evening, I found myself talking with two men. One of them opened his phone and showed us a photograph of Earth taken from an enormous distance. Against the blackness of space, our planet appeared as a tiny blue speck—beautiful, fragile, and barely there.

The accompanying article said, in essence, that everything that has ever happened here—all our loves and labors, our wars and religions, our triumphs and tragedies—is insignificant. We occupy one small planet among countless galaxies. In the vastness of the universe, it suggested, our lives mean nothing.

The man asked his friend what he thought.

His friend began with the word meaningless and sounded, for a moment, as though he might be quoting Ecclesiastes. But he never quite reached Solomon’s conclusion. He was “pretty sure” there was no God. In ancient Jerusalem, he might have felt at home among the Sadducees, except that even they believed in God. They simply had reservations about almost everything else.

It was late, so I thanked our hosts for including Patti and me, said goodnight, and went home.

But the conversation followed me.

For several days, I wrestled with the meaning of meaningless. I looked it up in a dictionary, then wandered through a thesaurus—which is something I highly recommend if you enjoy discovering nineteen additional ways to trouble yourself.

At last, I muttered a prayer asking God to show me whatever wisdom might be hiding in that conversation. Then, exhausted by the subject, I stopped composing all the brilliant answers I wished I had given.

That is often when God begins answering: after we finally stop helping Him.

A day or so later, I went to Starbucks to stock up on one of my favorite seasonal coffees, Casi Cielo. A friend had thoughtfully texted to warn me that it would soon disappear from the shelves.

At the register, the young woman asked if I really liked it.

“I do,” I said. “Have you tried it?”

“I don’t like coffee,” she replied.

“You work at Starbucks and don’t like coffee?”

She laughed and told me she preferred tea. Then she raised one hand as though a thought had just landed there.

“Wait a minute. We have one last pound in the store.”

Before I could explain that I didn’t need to spend any more money, she interrupted me.

“Employees are allowed one free pound of coffee. I want you to have mine.”

I had never met her before.

There we stood—an old man who likes coffee and a young woman who does not—while she gave away something that belonged to her simply because she thought it might bring me pleasure.

It was only coffee, of course.

But then again, it was not only coffee.

Kindness seldom announces itself with trumpets. More often, it appears behind a counter wearing a green apron. It hands you a pound of coffee and smiles, leaving you to decide whether you have merely received beans—or a blessing.

The name Casi Cielo means “almost heaven.”

Sometimes heaven comes closer than we think.

That weekend, I attended the graveside funeral of an aunt. It was good to see members of my family I hardly ever see anymore. Funerals have a strange way of gathering people. Death brings us together to remember life, and mourning sometimes opens the door through which laughter unexpectedly enters.

Not far from my aunt’s grave, my parents are buried. I stood before their headstone and found myself asking:

Gary, do you believe their lives were meaningless?

They are great-grandparents now. Their love has traveled farther than they ever did. It lives in children, grandchildren—in faces they never saw and stories they never heard.

If their lives meant nothing, what would that say about mine? About the others?

And why would grief hurt so much?

My aunt had known hardship, but she had also been given the gift of laughter. She, too, became a great-grandmother. It is difficult for me to regard such a life as insignificant simply because it occupied only one tiny corner of one tiny planet.

After the service, we gathered at a LongHorn Steakhouse. We ate, remembered, teased one another, and laughed.

There it was again: a feast.

A few days earlier, I had sat at a neighborhood table surrounded by people from around the world. Now I sat at another table surrounded by people who shared my blood and history. Between those two tables had come a stranger’s kindness and a graveyard’s sorrow.

Perhaps this was God’s answer.

Not an argument written across the sky. Not a voice thundering from the heavens. Just ordinary moments placed quietly beside one another like pieces of bread.

A blue planet.

A pound of coffee.

A gravestone.

A family laughing over supper.

The photograph from space was right about one thing: we are very small. But smallness and meaninglessness are not the same thing. A seed is small. A tear is small. A word of kindness is small. A baby is small.

Jesus Himself entered the world small enough to be held in a woman’s arms.

Ecclesiastes says that life is hebel—a vapor, a breath, something we cannot hold. Solomon was not saying that nothing matters. He was saying that nothing lasts long enough for us to possess it. Life slips through our fingers, and therefore we must receive it as a gift while it is here.

“To enjoy their work and accept their lot in life,” Solomon says, “is indeed a gift from God.”

Without God, life may look like little more than running in circles, chasing the wind.

But perhaps the wind was never meant to be caught.

Maybe it was meant to touch our faces, fill our lungs, move through the trees, and remind us that what cannot be seen may still be the very thing keeping us alive.

We are small, yes. Our lives are brief.

But we are seen.

And in the hand of God, even a vanishing breath can carry the fragrance of coffee, the sound of laughter, and the promise of heaven.

Copyright August 2024, June 2025, Gary Landerfelt, MyPericope.com