I am a delinquent friend. Weeks ago I purchased a birthday card for a special friend who is celebrating 80 years of life and then tonight I found out it was last week! You see, my birthday friend, Rog has Lou Gehrig's disease, and it is progressing rapidly. Each day it is getting more difficult for him to talk and soon that voice will be silent.
And so I was holding onto the card because I wanted it to say just the right thing or for me to write the perfect greeting, but every time I sat down it sounded shallow.
Tonight as I finished rereading The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis, the words from the book jumped off the page at me and became exactly the right encouragement for him, better than anything I could have composed. The words made me weep for the joy to come for all of us who are Christ followers and I knew it was meant to be shared with him. Happy birthday Rog!
"And as He spoke, He no longer looked to them like a lion; but the things that began to happen after that were so great and beautiful that I cannot write them. And for us this is the end of all the stories, and we can most truly say that they all lived happily ever after. But for them it was only the beginning of the real story. All their life in this world and all their adventures in Narnia had only been the cover and the title page: now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story, which no one on earth has read: which goes on forever: in which every chapter is better than the one before."
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