My Upper Room

When I was a kid, my mother used to read a small religious publication called "The Upper Room." Thinner than a Readers Digest but about the same dimensions. There were always one or two on the coffee table
in the living room. It always had a photo on the cover of a bearded, Caucasian Jesus in a soft tan robe, looking up at a sky of parted clouds, sun rays streaming down, hands clasped, perhaps a moment just after a storm. Odd note: that's what photographers now call "God Rays," sun rays that appear while shooting a landscape.

My father has taken up reading "The Upper Room," which is now in a larger format, more like the size of a regular magazine. As a kid, I didn't want to think of heaven as "a room." It sounded too claustrophobic. I was once told by someone it was a vast, endless place, a place you could run barefoot for miles through huge fields of grass in the summer sun, without any fear of stepping on a bumble bee or a shard of glass. Heaven was the place the old people go on that movie "Cocoon." You never get old, you never get sick, you never die and every single day is sunny and beautiful.

Yesterday, while surfing the Web, I found my ideal of "The Upper Room." I can't imagine a more wonderful place. Small and quaint, filled with art books, a small bed covered with fine linens, a few thrift store decorations, a stuffed rodent or two.... Yes, this is my heaven. This is my "Upper Room."