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Zyor, a master tutor, continued to guide Finney into a fuller understanding of heaven. Zyor explained he would later learn the skill of stepping across time as one steps across stones on a stream.

“One day you and I will not merely view the past, the great moments of history I was there to witness. But I will take you for a walk through those times. You will experience them as they actually happened.”

To his surprise, the major object of Finney’s study so far had been the events of his life on earth. When he would have been expecting to learn about the unknown, he was instead engaged in reinterpreting the known. The events that had flashed before him at death were not merely a summary of what had been, but an overview of a course of study he would need to master in heaven. Finney went back, reviewing his life, evaluating his choices, listening again to his words and seeing the powerful effects they had on people, for better and for worse. It was encouraging to see some of the previously unknown effects, but when he saw how he’d failed, sometimes even with Doc and Jake, it sobered him. Too often he’d been pigheaded and pushy, defensive when someone questioned his opinions.

He found himself looking at his life with a wholly new objectivity. It was almost as if he were watching Thornton Wilder’s
Our Town
, understanding things from the outside that the characters in the town could not see from the inside. How strange, he thought, to be on the outside of his own life looking in. While he was moved by what he saw in his life’s review, the passions within him were free of the whims of conditioning and biology. His emotions were now a trustworthy part of his mind, no longer a sometimes unreliable and manipulative propagandist trying to hold sway over it.

“I feel as if I were an artist, Zyor, and I painted my self-portrait, which was my life. At death I stepped off the canvas, and now for the first time I can see it, the whole picture. I can see it not as I saw it then, but as Elyon saw it. I don’t like everything I see, but I can now see it as it truly was.”

Zyor nodded his approval, as if this was the whole point—to see through God’s eyes, the eyes of eternity.

“I’m eager to finish my orientation and move on to the greater wonders of Elyon’s world. Yet I’m beginning to better understand the value of this reviewing process. When David was confronted by the prophet Nathan, he saw the point of the story only because he thought it was about someone else. It’s much easier to see our lives, and learn from them, when we can see them from the outside.”

“Exactly. You learn from the lives of others as you contemplate their stories. Now you are studying your own story, as you once studied
The Odyssey
in school. This time the story is real, not invented. You lived it. And now by reliving it you learn the lessons uniquely designed for you by Elyon. You rejoice in those you learned, complete those you began to learn but left unfinished, and now undertake for the first time those you never learned at all.”

“I never realized how many of those there were.”

“No man dies finished. Your first duty here is not to forget your life on earth but to understand it. You must milk it for all its meaning. Lessons not learned there must be learned now. Lessons learned there must be built upon now, as advanced mathematics must build on the simple. Inaccurate understandings must be cleared up. Elyon does not ignore such things, neither does he simply reverse their effects. Sin is gone, your mind is pure, but your understanding is not complete. Many lessons remain unlearned, and to share in heaven’s wonder all must learn them. Elyon does not force feed. He teaches only the willing and the ready. That which you were unwilling to learn on earth you must now be willing to learn. As you’ve seen, it is not all easy. It will take time. But here you have time, and you do not have the hindrances of sin and blindness. You will not like everything you see about the past, but you will see, and that is what matters.”

“Heaven is much more wonderful than I imagined. But this part is much more difficult than I would expect.”

“Joy and ease are not the same. As you scanned your computer disk for viruses and removed damaged and obsolete files, so here your mind must be purged to free you for all this place offers. On earth there were things held to be true that were not, and things held not to be true that were. You wrote your life on earth. Now for the first time you are reading it. Those who lived it carefully will find more joy in their readings, as one finds more joy in good literature than in bad. Those who crafted their lives according to plan and purpose wrote books of enduring quality and depth. Those who did not have nothing to review but a hastily written first draft. They will see its flaws and weaknesses and superficiality, and wish they had written it more carefully. Of course, it is too late to edit it now. The deadline is past, and the edition is final. But it is not too late to learn from it. And learning the truth is central to heaven.”

“The joy here is beyond description, Zyor. But I never thought of it as involving review and reflection. I thought we would look forever forward without ever looking back.”

“But ‘back’ is where Elyon began his work in you. He will not give up on his creatures by abandoning the process he began. He will bring it to completion. As for joy, you cannot separate joy from truth. There is no joy in ignoring or denying truth. The rejection of truth is the rejection of joy. And by embracing truth, even truth that is difficult and unpleasant, we are made ready to fully embrace joy. Elyon’s Book says you will yet stand before the judgment seat of Christ, giving an account for what you did while on earth.

“You come from a world where truth is obscured, shrouded, reinterpreted. The father of lies dominates, and the world order has become built around lies, which are mistaken for truths because the majority believe them, as if the universe were a democracy and truth subject to a vote. Men choose to believe certain things because they find them flattering, comfortable, and popular. But truth is seldom any of these. They choose to disbelieve other things because they are unflattering, uncomfortable, and unpopular. But none of these have any relevance to the question of truth.”

“I suppose hell is the ultimate example of that?”

“Yes. No one wants it to be true, therefore men declare it is not. They might just as well vote on the law of gravity. Their confident consensus there is no law of gravity will be no consolation to the man who walks off the tenth story of a building. There
is
a hell. All roads cannot and do not lead to the same place. The heights of heaven’s mountains are measured against the depth of hell’s valleys. The joys of salvation are in contrast to the horrors of damnation that you and every one of your kind deserved, and but for Elyon’s grace, would be doomed to experience for eternity.

“Men take their favorite lies and make them sound grand and noble by calling them ‘truths.’ But they cannot be truths, because they have been invented by men, and men have no power over truth. Truth by its nature prevails, and lies by their nature wither in truth’s eternal fire. Every untruth, every half-truth, every pretense—no matter how fashionable and widely believed—shall be shown for what it is, declared a lie in the sight of all men for all time.

“High stakes give meaning to war, courtship, even to games. Heaven and hell are the high stakes that give meaning to life on earth. Man denies the stakes are real. He says all life’s roads lead to the same place, and that therefore it makes no difference which road men choose. But the truth remains the truth, unimpeded by the lie. The roads lead to very different places, opposite places, to infinite joy or infinite misery, to unimaginable glory or unimaginable tragedy. That is why a man’s choice of roads could not be more important.”

“The stakes
are
high,” Finney responded. “And not only in the difference between heaven and hell, but of a Christian life well lived and poorly lived.”

“You are learning, my master. It is time to return now to the study of your life on earth. As you relive it, as you listen again to the things the world told you, consider this. In the darkness, men can shine flashlights on a sundial and make it tell any time they want. But only the sun tells the true time. The flashlights are the changing and fleeting opinions of men. The sun is the eternal Word of God. Only God makes truth. Men either discover it or fail to discover it. They either interpret it rightly or interpret it wrongly. But they have no power to make truth or change it. For truth is no man’s servant. Ultimately, the truth must become each person’s friend or his enemy, his master or his judge.”

CHAPTER TWELVE

J
ake walked restlessly around the
Trib
newsroom again, looking for insight. His feelings about his profession ran deep but contradicted each other. He knew Sue’s perception of journalists was inaccurate and unfair. Certainly the conscious journalistic bias she believed in didn’t exist. The bordering-onsatanic conspiracy to hide or warp the truth, to silence or discredit Christians was a myth, one journalists could only laugh at or deeply resent, usually both.

He looked around him at Sandy and Jerry and others like them. They were good decent people, with lives and families and hopes and dreams of their own. The last thing they wanted to do was subvert or destroy their society. On the contrary, they’d become journalists because they believed society was worth preserving and improving, and they felt their values and ideas and skills could help. No less than Sue and her friends, they wanted their children to grow up in a better world.

Yet Jake knew some of what Sue had said was true. For the last few years he’d become increasingly cynical about his profession, much more than he dared let on to Sue. There was a great deal of politics in this newsroom, and a lot of it made its way into news stories. Most of it, he was convinced, was unconscious and incidental, but it was nonetheless real.

As he leaned against the wall near National desk’s coffee pot, emptying his packet of cream and swirling it with a swizzle stick, his eyes landed on Debbie Sawyer. He remembered Debbie’s feature stories years ago on the Clarence Thomas hearings. She’d painted it as a clear-cut issue of male sexism and harassment. Never mind fatal flaws in Hill’s testimony. Never mind that virtually every person who knew both Hill and Thomas believed Thomas. Jake still wasn’t sure who told the truth, but he remembered as if it was yesterday that anyone at the
Trib
who even raised the possibility that Hill rather than Thomas might be lying was labeled sexist. Accordingly, virtually every
Trib
article had been a Hill puff piece, leaving Thomas the unmistakable chauvinist villain.

Much as he eschewed Thomas’s political views, Jake found it hard to swallow the presumption a conservative man was incapable of telling the truth and a liberal woman was incapable of lying. He’d started a column raising the possibility that it was Hill who had lied. He worked on it for several days, looking over his shoulder to be sure no one saw. Finally, he tore it up. It wasn’t worth it. In the years since, he’d been ashamed of himself for not going through with that column. What the
Trib
did back then, Jake had to admit, wasn’t journalism, it was advocacy, pure and simple. And by holding back, he’d become a silent partner in the travesty. That fact ate at him, even now.

As he read the
Trib
, he’d been seeing more and more of the reporter’s presence in a story—once considered the ultimate no-no. Just last week Marty Hawes, a political reporter, had gone into a bar on 27th Street to ask what the common man thought of the former mayor who was considering running for governor. Jake happened to know Marty despised this man. He had a personal vendetta going back to some story they’d fought about years ago. So here was an article getting the opinion of the common man, and Hawes said something to the effect, “one man seemed to capture the consensus here when he said this candidate is a thief and a fraud, and you can’t trust him any farther than you can throw him.”

After reading it Jake thought, “Isn’t that a coincidence? The common man thinks just like Marty.”

In his journal he’d labeled it “journalistic ventriloquism.” People became wooden dummies who said whatever the reporter wanted to say. Ask enough people and somebody will say it, you quote it, and no one ever sees the rest of your notes, if in fact you bothered jotting down the unwanted comments in the first place. He was glad to be a columnist, paid to give his opinion, not having to smuggle it in the back door.

From National’s coffee station, leaning against the big red Coke machine, he could see almost the whole floor, over two hundred journalists at work this moment. He considered what a large percentage of his colleagues were divorced. Many had remarried and divorced again. The single were between marriages, the married between divorces. Jake, himself a statistic, held this against no one. But the fact remained that journalism was hard on the family. Reporters kept weird hours and long ones, and when they weren’t working they were preoccupied with the thought of work. Jake’s efforts to advance his career had taken a toll on his own marriage, he knew. And the atmosphere at the
Trib
was, well, open and freewheeling. A lot of people thrown together, working next to each other, day after day, talking more with each other than with their husbands or wives. The thrill and rewards of work overshadowed the daily drudgery of home. A lot of romances, a lot of affairs. Most were short-lived, which made things a bit complicated, walking every day past people whose eyes you used to want to meet, and now you desperately want to avoid. Jake wasn’t speculating. He’d experienced it first hand. But, he supposed, it wasn’t that much different than any modern workplace. It had left him somewhat defensive in the “family values” debates, he had to admit.

Jake took his last gulp of coffee and summarized his musings. Journalists were like doctors, businessmen, mechanics, plumbers, attorneys, teachers, preachers, anyone. They were ordinary, imperfect people. There were those who cared deeply and did their best to be fair, and others who were arrogant and self-serving, using people to further their ideologies and careers. Journalism was no different than plumbing—except that it affected not only pipes and water flow but the minds and perceptions of society. Journalists were like everyone else—except that while others held in their hands pea shooters and slingshots, they happened to be holding a rocket launcher. Hence the saying, “Don’t get in a word fight with someone who buys ink by the barrel.”

It was a strategic position, Jake thought, one the careful could use to serve society, and the careless could badly abuse. He felt pleased to know he was part of the former group.

After a few more hours at his desk, Jake set out in his Mustang for a drive in the country, as he sometimes did to let a column gestate or to sort out the turns of life. Three years ago he’d taken such a drive to figure out whether he and Janet’s marriage had a future. Two years ago he’d had to decide whether to take an attractive job offer with the
Boston Globe.
He still didn’t really know why he hadn’t. It was a great career move. But his friends and his…family…were here, and here was Oregon. He just couldn’t bring himself to leave. If he had the same offer today, with Finney and Doc gone, he wondered if he’d reconsider it. Home had lost much of its draw.

It was a mid-November afternoon. The leaves were past their prime but still colorful on the country hillside, artfully herded by the gentle winds into piles up next to old barns and farmhouses. He took some new and different turns in the road today, tiring of the old paths, and curious where the new ones would lead. Barren roads beckoned ahead and receded behind, except for one car headed his same direction, barely visible in his rearview mirror had he looked carefully, which he didn’t.

Tonight was his date with Mary Ann. He’d told her he’d be working late at the
Trib
, and had intended to until just an hour ago, when he was overcome with the compulsion to get out, to get away. And here he was, in the middle of nowhere, knowing where he’d been but not where he was going.

Farm houses, few and far between, dotted the landscape. Smoke trailed out chimneys, dissipating into nothingness. Such is life, Jake thought. Over a rolling hillside, he suddenly saw on the left side of the road a plotted area with a short wrought iron fence. It was a graveyard. For a moment Jake looked away and wanted to speed on by. It was the last thing he wanted to think about. But it was as if an unseen force compelled him to pull over.

He could see no one in any direction, just farmland surrounding this cemetery, which itself was bordered by tall willows and maple trees trying in vain to hold on to their remaining leaves. There was no church here. Perhaps once there had been. Perhaps this had been the center of a little town. Jake’s face turned pale and clammy as he walked uncertainly to the edge of the graveyard. Suddenly it grew much darker. The hillside blocked the sun, and clouds obscured it as well, creating such an abrupt change it felt like an eclipse.

Black and white frames of Boris Karloff movies flickered in his mind, playing him as a private audience. Of all times to walk through a cemetery, a gloomy late afternoon twilight. This wasn’t at all like the symmetrical rows of Memorial Military Cemetery, where his father was buried. Here there seemed no rhyme or reason, with tombstones as varied, random and tilted as life itself. This seemed a more accurate reflection of death than the mock precision of Memorial. Death was random and purposeless, so why not the harbingers of death?

Jake noted the loveliness of the late fall flowers. Stooping low over a purple chrysanthemum, he saw a tiny droplet of water turning the last remaining gleam of sunlight into a miniature rainbow.

How could death and life exist in such close proximity? What could explain such a living vibrant world languishing under the sentence of death? Death would ultimately defeat life, of that he felt certain. He could almost hear the sounds of warrior insects chewing greedily, their mandibles devouring the splendor of each flower, racing to destroy them before the cold did. The flowers would not last, could not last, and their transitory beauty saddened Jake. Nothing could last in this world of destruction and decay.

Melancholy overtook him. Tree branch shadows became long spidery fingers threatening to grab his ankles and pull him under ground, which itself became a carnivore, a salivating T-Rex wanting to eat him alive. He shook off the chill of the moment, sensing that beyond the silly superstitions of graveyards, something real, something dark and sinister, did not want him here, for whatever reason.

The variegated layout of this graveyard left every next step unpredictable. Behind the next tree or the next tall tombstone, who knew what he would find…or what would find him. He wished he’d not seen the mad slasher movies whose graveyard massacres flooded his mind now. Death was not as unrelated to life as he wanted to believe. It was quiet, deathly quiet. Where were the animal sounds that should inhabit places like these? It was as if lesser creatures were keeping respectful silence for man their master, whose remains lay here.

Who were these people whose bodies were assembled like dead butterflies in a collection? Did their lives matter? Did anyone care? The cemetery was abandoned. No fresh flowers, only wild ones. No freshly turned mounds of dirt to show a recent burial. Only tombstones worn by the elements, fractured by decade after decade of water invading and freezing in their cracks, sinking and tilting as the earth underneath them grew too tired to hold them up.

The most recent date on a gravestone Jake could see was 1909. Before World War I. Before his own father was born. He studied the names and found himself wanting to weave tales about them.

David Elijah Rothman, born July 3, 1898, died July 3, 1898. To be born and die the same day, to know this world so briefly. How did little David die? Of cholera? Of some disease that no longer existed or would now be easily treated? If David had been born ten years ago, would he still be alive now? Was it his fault that he was born too soon? What is the purpose in a child’s death the day he was born? David had parents who loved him, who must have grieved terribly. Yes, there, that big tombstone with the military insignia…Robert Rothman, born September 15, 1858. Wasn’t that around the Civil War? Did Robert’s father fight in that war? Died November 2, 1908. Fifty years old. Jake shuddered. Robert had been Jake’s age when he died.

Another stone, between father and child, belonged to Elizabeth Rothman, born June 12, 1869. Robert’s wife and David’s mother. Died—what was this? Died August 20, 1898. At only twenty-nine? Did she die in childbirth? No, it was six weeks after David’s birth and death. Jake shivered again, the cold moist air turning more frigid as the sun began to set. Did Elizabeth die of a broken heart at losing David?

What was the gravestone just the other side of Robert’s? “Sarah Staley Rothman. Born April 3, 1835.” Ah, this must be Robert’s mother. She must have made the journey on the Oregon Trail with Robert and Elizabeth. “Died June 23, 1898.” What? Only ten days before David was born and died. She didn’t even get to see her grandson. And poor Robert. The man had his mother, son, and wife all taken from him in a two-month period.

The senselessness of it all saddened Jake. What possible explanation would suffice? Why would God, if there was a God, take a child from his mother’s arms? And take a mother from a son who loved her enough not to leave her behind, but bring her with him down the Oregon Trail to the new land? And what kind of God would look at this man staggering in his grief, and then take his wife from him as well? How helpless and lonely he must have felt. As helpless and lonely—though perhaps not as angry—as Hyuk had felt at his own loss of mother, wife, and son.

Who knew or cared about the Rothman family? Who told their stories now? They were like pebbles dropped in a pond, whose ripples lasted only a moment. What difference had their lives made? None, it seemed to Jake. They were gone, long gone.

David’s little monument had been worn smooth by the hard Oregon rains and winds. Jake bent down to read the words, the moist dirt soaking into his knee. For a moment, he started to get up, remembering these were the clothes he would wear to dinner with Mary Ann. But curiosity pulled him back down.

“David Elijah Rothman. Taken by his Lord as he left the womb, as Enoch, beloved of God, taken before his time.” Then underneath, in small print, “Jesus said unto her, ‘I am the resurrection and the Life: He that believeth in Me, though he were dead, yet shall he live.’”