Janet is With Jesus

 

Janet is with Jesus. That’s the title of the last chapter of her book.

 

I like to think about our lives as God’s story writ large in a series of chapters.  Dear Janet’s book is filled with fascinating and mundane chapters, just like the books about your life and like mine.  But as I thought about Janet’s life my understanding of our lives being lived in ‘chapters’ took on a new meaning. Janet is a Grandma and one of her two grandsons is named Jon. When Jon was a toddler, still learning to talk, Grandma would read stories to Jon.

 

When Janet read stories to Jon, she always finished the book by declaring, “All done.” If you know Janet you can almost hear her quiet, sweet voice go up a few pitches as she closes the cover, raising her hands from her lap, smiling at Jon saying, almost singing, “All done.”

 

Grandma was so persistent in her practice that these simple words became Jon’s first words as a child, “All done.” You can imagine him mimicking Grandma, sitting in his high chair having finished his cookie, smiling at his Momma and Daddy and for the first time saying the words in toddler speak,  ‘All done.’

 

Yesterday we bade farewell to Janet, a small gathering round her grave, family and pastors trying to make sense of life and death.

 

One is tempted, in our limited human understanding, to look at Janet’s body in her casket and say, almost sighing, ‘All done.’

 

But we would be wrong to do so. Because we know that the story we have been reading of Janet’s life is not over. No. God is still writing her unending story.  The next to last chapter, concluding at the graveside, is all done. But the last chapter, the really wonderful last chapter, the chapter than never ends, has just begun. For that chapter, which describes how Janet is enjoying her inheritance of the new heaven and the new earth, that chapter, is never all done.

 

Because Janet is with Jesus.