The Valley

continued

And love him Max and Grace did. They asked for and got his release, and though at first George was afraid to meet them, the Ellerbusches' soon became his second home. After school he'd stop in to work with Max in his instrument repair shop or join the family for a meal around the kitchen table. George was there the afternoon of my visit, a gangly teenager with an outbreak of acne on his forehead, helping his "littIe sister" with her homework.

I kept up with the Ellerbusches over the years, as George grew up and started a career and family of his own. But it wasn't just a fifteen- year-old's life that was transformed in that heaven-lit moment. The Max Ellerbusch I know is an outgoing person, demonstrative in his love for his wife and his children.

"That wasn't me at all," he says. "If you'd known me before this happened, you'd wonder, What's bugging this guy? I had a chip on my shoulder the size of a log.

I have to take his word for it - and Grace confirms it. "He was so uptight he'd grind his teeth in his sleep."

And the transformation came, not when all was well, but in the deepest valley of his life.

They never last long, these flashes from heaven. Maybe here on earth we can't endure such brightness for more than an instant. One Sunday morning at St. Andrew's Cathedral in Aberdeen, Scotland, in 1999, the opening hymn was about angels:

They sing because thou art their Sun; Lord, send a beam on me; For where heaven is but once begun There alleluias be.

The author knows that light from heaven! I thought. John Mason knows that a single beam from that Sun will change a life. One ray, and we join the chorus that forever sings, "Alleluia!"