“I shall miss Mother this Christmas,” the clerk in the local store told me. Her mother had died recently, and this would be the first Christmas without her.

When her mother entered the hospital, the doctor told the family to stay out of the room so that she could rest.

“So I stayed out in the hall,” the clerk recalled. “Finally, I could stand it no longer, and I went in. Mother said, ‘I thought you’d never come!'”

Blinking back tears, the clerk added with a smile, “I think those will be the first words she’ll say to me when I get to Heaven.”

Psalm 116:15 says, “Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of his saints” (KJV). I didn’t understand this verse until I realized that I had been looking at death from my perspective, not from God’s point of view.

Ever since my children left home for school or to get married, their return has brought a joy that one understands only when their children grow up, leave home and then return. Just as “there is joy in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner that repenteth” (Luke 15:10, KJV), so, too, there is joy in Heaven as each child of God comes home.

Taken by permission from “Legacy of a Pack Rat,” by Ruth Bell Graham, ©1989 The Ruth Graham Literary Trust.