Randa helped me move some stuff down to the new house on  Monday of last week. She and our French Brittany Spaniel, Layla, rode in the big black Silverado that we all know belongs to Randa. I drove the nearly twenty-year-old Ranger, mainly because it’s my truck and it’s a wimpy little four-cylinder and there wasn’t room for Layla in it.

After two storms and under threatening skies, we’d loaded up the horse trailer with a few things that would make life less primitive in the new house: a dining table and a couple of chairs, a new mattress set, a few useful tools, and other odds and ends. Because we had more faith in the forecast than in our ability to change the weather, we opted not to load anything that wasn’t pretty much waterproof into the back of either pickup.

Even though we drove through a few showers in the two-hundred-and-fifty miles between Blair and Ark City, nothing inside the trailer showed any signs of water. We unloaded in less than a fourth of the time the loading took. That’s how it always seems to go. A lot of time in the preparing and packing, the stacking and loading and then, not so much with the unloading. I reckon it’s kind of like cooking a big meal for a lot of folks. You spend a couple of days cooking and prepping and then everybody’s through eating in about twenty minutes or so. I have to admit, that observation is strictly observation; it’s got nothing to do with personal experience from the other side of the counter.

Maybe life itself is kind of that way, too. We spend a lot of time getting ready for things that end pretty quickly: weddings, family reunions, birthday parties and graduations.

I’m reasonably sure that heaven will be a significant exception.

At the outside, most of us will spend less than a hundred years getting prepared. At the end, even that stretch of time will seem to have flashed by in just a few breaths. And then… eternity.

I’m pretty sure it’s going to be worth the getting ready.

H. Arnett
9/16/15