It is Closer Than You Think

This week, I chose to participate in Mama Kat’s Writer’s workshop, and oddly enough I chose the prompt that has more to do with a picture than writing.  Even so, it is a writing workshop, so it belongs here in The Writing Nook.  My assignment was to post a picture and a description to fit the quote below.

“How far to heaven? Just open your eyes and look, you are in heaven.” Shankar

Strangely enough, I received my writing assignment an hour or so after going for a walk and seeing this breathtaking view. Fate I tell you, it must have been fate.

As I was sauntering through my neighborhoodlooking forward to taking Caden on his evening walk in fall when you can breathe outside instead of now when you can smell your skin roasting like a rotisserie chicken, I glanced up to see heaven’s gates.

“What? Heaven’s gates?”  Well, that is the first thing I thought it when I viewed this (for lack of a more truthfully descriptive adjective) heavenly sight.  Glance at it yourself for a moment. There in the middle of an endless sky filled with lustrous clouds, was a single opening laced with a golden glow. Someone, somewhere was being welcomed home.

I don’t see swirling “rod iron” gates of gold with a giant padlock on them that is only to be unlocked by a little man at a desk.  Mind you, a little man at a desk who also holds a book that continually grows new pages of rights and wrongs. I don’t see him.  Neither do I see a long bearded man upon a throne larger than my house making my kneel while reminding me of the sins I have been forgiven for and the deeds He is grateful I have done.  I see this.  This is heaven.

A simple reminder to look around because  life is beautiful, life is good, this is my heaven for now and one day the view I am looking at will open again for me. How far to heaven?  Just open your eyes and look up.