A Glimpse of the Eternal

A night that felt as close to heaven on earth as we’ll get before our Savior returns.

Grace Giebler performing that night

I’m sitting in a coffee shop when a large group of Mennonites walks in. The younger ones are holding hands and they find a table to socialize with each other. The married ones break off into two groups: men talking to men and women talking to women.

The friend I’m with is a talker. He’ll talk to anybody who is interested. And it doesn’t take him long to go deep. When one of them comes over and asks if he can use one of our chairs, that’s all my buddy needs.

“Are you Amish or Mennonite?”

“We’re Mennonite.” He distinguishes their branch of Mennonite from the many others (who knew?).

“What brings you here?”

The man — a twenty-something with a beard — looks like a lumberjack. And he’s a gentle soul.

“Here?”

“To the coffee shop.”

“We’re from a small town in Iowa and are here to sing at a nursing home. Just finished.”

That led to a fifteen-minute conversation about the Mennonite education system, the importance of a relationship with Christ, and what the man does for a living. We learn that he’s a twenty-five-year-old, married electrician. He married his wife at twenty-two.

A baby from their group crawls across the floor, pushing a small homemade truck that appears to have been carved out of wood. And a toddler runs around on wobbly legs, resembling a young deer that just learned to stand.

One of the deacons and his wife from my church walk in, apparently on a date night. We wave at each other before they disappear toward the back of the coffee shop.

A singer I’m a fan of walks in with her family and a friend. She waves at me on her way to the coffee line.

My buddy and I have a long conversation about ways we can maybe engage with people who are stuck in the immediate (jobs, finances, sports) and maybe bend conversations toward the eternal.

Eventually, he finishes his drink, looks at his watch, and heads home. He’s usually in bed by 8:00 or 9:00. I move to a new table at the front of the coffee shop to be closer to the entertainment for the evening.

Grace Giebler, a twenty-something-year-old Catholic woman with an old soul, pages through a binder as her final set winds to a close. Yes, a binder, not an iPad. She finally settles on “To Make You Feel My Love.”

Both of her sets are from another era. She often chooses to sing songs from the 1960s and ‘70s but just as easily flows into Grace Potter classics. And her rendition of “Silent Night” will bring goosebumps to your arms.

It’s her last night with her guitar player. He’s moving on after 200-plus gigs. As the final set comes to a close, tears flow as she recounts how they met on a local college campus four years ago. Partway through this jaunt down memory lane, he begins to cry.

It strikes me that these are important snapshots. And in a way, on a night like tonight, it feels like it’s as close to heaven on earth as we’ll get before our Savior returns. People with a different way of understanding God coming together to fellowship.

The next day, we all went off to our own churches to worship. And that’s good too. But I feel like we, as the church, need nights like this. We need to see and experience expressions of faith that differ from ours. In a way, it gives us a glimpse of the eternal — a reminder of something beyond the temporal and fleeting nature of everyday life.