Dispatch #3
A Wall I Had Never Noticed
Hi … Thanks for coming back. I have more to tell you.
My room has not changed in years. Long and rectangular, wooden walls, a plain wooden table down the center, benches on either side where we sit and talk and eat together. I know its shape the way I know the shape of my own house.
One day the far wall was different.
It had always simply been a wall. Now it was glass, floor to ceiling, side to side, the entire end of the room turned into a single window. I walked down to it and looked out.
The room sat high up inside something enormous. A structure rising like a great beehive, still under construction, layer stacked upon layer, reaching further than I could see in either direction. I understood, without being told, that this was the temple of God, still being built across the ages, waiting for the day of his descent to the earth.
My own room was one stone in that rising wall. One lit space among countless others, set into place the way each new soul is set into place, the whole structure climbing a little higher with every generation that comes to faith.
In a later visit, the window opened onto something else. A courtyard, vast, and across it, other rooms, lit from within. People inside them, sitting where I was sitting, looking out the way I was looking out. Some of them saw me. They waved.
I thought of the great cloud of witnesses, the ones who ran their race and are somehow still watching ours. I understood that the rooms remain long after the ones who occupied them have gone on, and that some of the people waving back at me that day were not gone at all, but very much alive, keeping the same appointment I was keeping, on some other ordinary evening of their own.
I did not ask a question that day. I did not write anything down until much later. I only stood at the glass for a long while, watching a temple still being built, and other lit windows, and hands raised in greeting from across a courtyard I had never known was there.
