There was a not-so-fantastic movie that I somehow ended up owning called Alex and Emma about a writer who’s struggling to finish a novel in 30 days so that he can pay back some loan sharks (seriously). The Emma character, played by Kate Hudson, likes to read the ending of books to determine whether or not she’d actually like the book which of course drives Alex, played by Luke Wilson, completely nuts. I’m not necessarily going to share an ending per se, but it is the Afterword of a book. I haven’t read it yet, but found this excerpt to be comforting and can’t wait to pick it up.

From Donald Miller’s A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life, a book about getting a second chance at life the first time around:

I don’t wonder anymore what I’ll tell God when I go to heaven, when we sit in the chairs under the tree, outside the city.  I’ll tell him about Mike Barrow riding his bike into the Atlantic Ocean, and about Bob Goff and his family jumping off the dock, waving good-bye to world leaders as they left the lodge.  I’ll ask God if he remembers when I fell apart in the hotel room in Los Angeles, and he’ll look comfortingly at me and tell me he was there.  I’ll tell him about Jason and his family, about breaking ground on the orphanage in Mexico, and about my friends drilling wells in Africa.  I’ll tell him about The Mentoring Project, how quiet the kids are when they meet their mentors, and how we can’t get them to stop talking only a month later.  I’ll tell these things to God, and he’ll laugh, I think, and he’ll remind me of the parts I forgot, the parts that were his favorites.  We’ll sit and remember my story together and then he’ll stand and put his arms around me and say, “Well done,” and that he liked my story.  And my soul won’t be thirsty anymore.

Finally, he’ll turn, and we’ll walk toward the city, a city he will have spoken into existence, a city built in a place where once there’d been nothing.