It’s funny how the first person you knew with a certain name can influence your feelings about that name forever. Thanks to memorable characters from the distant past, my list of favorite names includes Emily, Alison, Cathy, Sam, Joe, and Fred … and of course there’s a counter-list of names that give me the creeps.

And then there’s the name Maureen.

In the early 60s, when I was around 10, my daddy the civil engineer was doing some business with a fellow named Jack DeWitt. One day Mr. DeWitt brought his wife and little girl to visit us in Green Bay from their home in Mt. Horeb, Wisconsin, over 150 miles away.

Maureen was just my age, although much taller and neater than I, and she must’ve been awfully nice. Her visit has been etched in my memory by a couple of snapshots and a thank-you letter from her that has somehow survived nearly a half century of household moves and spring cleanings.

For some reason, I never came across another Maureen in the decades that followed – until a sunny Saturday August afternoon, when I came home from the grocery store to find a lovely message waiting on voice mail. It had been left by a woman named Maureen Enriquez. She lived not far from us, she said, and had just finished reading Heaven Without Her -- a first-person account of my journey from feminist atheism to unshakable faith in Jesus Christ in the wake of my beloved Christian mother’s death.

“I’ve never called an author before,” the woman said, “but I just wanted to let you know how much I identified with your story!”

I picked up the phone and called “Maureen II,” as I’d already dubbed the bold Mrs. Enriquez. Learning that she and her husband were new Christians with a great interest in the Bible, I invited them to my Bible-teaching New Testament church. They showed up the following Sunday.

Once die-hard feminist career junkies, Maureen and I still worked long hours. So it was that nearly three months passed before we were able to do anything more than chat before and after church services. But finally, in early November of that year, she and I met in a rustic 19th century farmhouse restaurant for sandwiches.

Over the next hour, we found to our astonishment that our lives had been practically mirror images in key respects: We’d been born in the same year and had known the joy of storybook childhoods lived out in small Wisconsin towns. We’d both been well-raised (and well-churched) by loving parents against whom we had rebelled early, often and finally completely. Our dads had both been self-made men, well-respected in their professions and communities. We’d even both been crazy about everything from dogs, horses and tiger lilies to dirndl dresses straight from Germany.
 
As we were finishing up our sandwiches, Maureen said something that prompted me to ask her maiden name – a non sequitur, it would seem, but for some reason the question just popped out.

“DeWitt,” she said hesitantly, apparently finding it an odd question herself.

I gasped. “Maureen,” I said, almost unable to breathe, “is your father’s name Jack?”

She literally did a double-take. “How did you know?”

“Did you grow up in Mount Horeb?”

“I never told you that!”

And so it was that I discovered Maureen II was actually one and the same as Maureen I, the little girl who’d come to visit nearly a half century ago.

So unbelievable was this discovery that she even called her 90-year-old father to see if it could possibly be true. Jack not only remembered my dad, who had died in 1970; he said they’d traveled to Germany together on business back in the 1960s.

Maureen and I jabbered until the restaurant closed for the day, then parted reluctantly. It wasn’t until later that I realized I’d forgotten to tell my new old friend one of the most amazing facts of all: that in chapter 27 of Heaven Without Her, I’d named another long-ago little girl Maureen, because I flat-out couldn’t remember that little girl’s name.

This in spite of the fact that she had been my best friend during the remarkable summer of 1961, when my parents had left me, then eight, with family friends while they headed off to Europe. It was the summer that would, 40 years later, help me see the world with eternal eyes, as a heaven-bound child of God whose beloved parents have simply gone on ahead.
 
It was such a heartfelt story for me that I emailed Maureen to tell her about it, inserting a little passage from chapter 27 to jog her memory:
 
Arlene even found a playmate for me. Her name was Maureen. She was my age and lived up the hill from Arlene’s house. Her house was exotic, too: it had no upstairs, and her backyard was all wooded, and there were these beautiful flowers in front, in a bed framed by split-rail fencing. I remember in particular stunning orange blossoms with freckles, which my new friend called tiger lilies.
 
“Imagine that,” I typed. “You had such an impact on me that I even named this wonderful little girl after you!”

A little while later, Maureen emailed me back.

“My parents just about killed themselves,” she’d written, “laying down that split-rail fencing.”

Then, to make sure I didn’t miss her point, she added, “It completely escaped me that while reading chapter 27 I was reading about myself!”

I read these things through tears of joy, overwhelmed by a God who loves us enough to let us see His hand on our lives.

Perhaps that was His sole purpose in arranging this reunion. Or perhaps there are many others that Maureen and I will discover some happy day, now that we’ve both bounded through the narrow gate that leads to eternal life. Imagine how astounding it will be when we are able to examine the tapestry of this world and see the threads that have brought each of us into His kingdom forevermore!

There’s a post-script to this story. A few weeks later, right before Christmas, Maureen and I drove through a snow storm to visit her parents for a joyful reunion. We were even able to solve a final mystery: how she’d come across Heaven Without Her in the first place.

It turned out that her older brother had seen a review of my book in Acts & Facts magazine, a publication of the Institute for Creation Research in Dallas. It’s an outstanding magazine, but not one you’d find at your local newsstand. Yet he had stumbled across it, read the review, and was intrigued enough to seek the book out. Then, liking the story, he took the unusual step of sending it to his sister Maureen.

The rest, as they say, is history. 

​“If there is a god,” said the photographer, her voice muffled by the tower of equipment in her face, “point your chin down a little, that’s it – if he or she exists, then he just wants me to be kind to others. And to be happy. God just wants us to be happy. Chin up a bit. Good.”

It was tough to maintain a pleasant expression in the face of this all-too-familiar tripe. But I was paying plenty for the privilege of being contorted into these painfully photogenic positions, so I gave it my best shot.

“I think that’ll do it, if you want to relax,” she said, standing erect again and beaming at me. She was a pretty young woman, with dark eyes and shiny dark brown hair and dimples that had probably driven many a high-school boy to distraction a decade ago.

“The thing is,” she added, turning her attention back to her camera to do whatever it is that digital photographers do to transfer their work to the computer screen, “I’m a really good person. If there’s a heaven, I know I’ll be a shoo-in. Now, just give me a few minutes and I’ll get this on the computer for you.” She dashed out of the jewel-toned room, leaving me alone with the props covering every spare square inch in the room.
I argued silently with the real God.

“Lord,” I said, squeezing my eyes closed to keep my mind from wandering, “can I just give it a rest? I gave her my testimony, I told her why I believe in you and your precious Word, can I please just let it go now and leave?”

Silence. Of course. God doesn’t speak to us through our ears, just in our hearts, through His word.

Luke 15:7 popped into my head: “I say to you that likewise there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine just persons who need no repentance.” I could almost hear Jesus saying these words.

I’ll be honest: My heart did not leap at the prospect of bringing joy to my Savior; it sank with the burden of needing to explain the Gospel to someone who obviously hadn’t been listening to my in-a-nutshell overview of how I’d discovered the Bible to be uniquely true, the inerrant and infallible word of God.

I sighed loudly to express my unhappiness. “Okay, Lord,” I thought. “But make her bring it up, will you?”

I looked around at all the stuff on the floors and shelves and chairs in the room. There was enough to open a toy store, everything from balls and dolls to teddy bears and funny hats. I spotted a beautiful globe hidden behind three balloons on a shelf in the corner. I wished for a moment that I could go back to being a normal person, able to look at these items and enjoy them, instead of worrying about the immortal souls of the photographer and her kids and everyone else she was in a position to influence.

And then I remembered what I’d been like as a normal person, and where I’d been unwittingly preparing to spend eternity. Not a pretty picture.

“All set,” the photographer called cheerfully. “Come and look!”

I was her only customer that afternoon, although with her puppy-dog personality she probably shouted out such instructions even with a waiting-room full of subjects.  She’d told me she had two children and three dogs; maybe yelling was the only way to communicate in her household.

I found her in a little nook off the waiting room, seated at a computer desk and clicking away enthusiastically with her mouse. One by one, she showed me the portraits she’d just taken, she apparently thrilled with her work, I cringing inwardly at the double chin I’d never noticed before, not to mention the bags under my eyes and the thickening of my cheeks and neck.

“I quit smoking three packs a day a few years ago,” I volunteered, answering the question she must surely have been asking herself about how I could’ve let myself get so pudgy. “I used to be thin.”

She paused the slide show and looked at me curiously.

“How’d you quit? I’ve tried and tried and I just can’t seem to do it.”

“Well, I was praying for a dear little boy,” I said, trying to tell in a few words a story I’d told at length so many times that it bored me, “and I just sensed that it was time – that my quitting smoking would be the answer to this particular prayer, as nonsensical as it seemed at the time. So I did.”

“Wow,” she said. “So, didn’t it bother you?”

I admitted that it hadn’t been the easiest thing in the world, and that it still bothered me at times.

“But the point is that I couldn’t have done it at all without God’s instruction and His help,” I said. “No way.

She nodded, staring at me intently, as if I’d just revealed some complex mathematical equation that was taking a while to sink in.

“I quit drinking at the same time, to make the smoking easier,” I added. “And I was not a casual drinker. But that part of it was a piece of cake – He took away my taste for booze entirely.”

“Wow,” she said again, swiveling her chair towards me now, apparently forgetting the reason we were sitting there.

Encouraged, I pressed on. “The Bible says that when we make Jesus our Lord and Savior, He makes us new creatures, so that we’re able to put off the old and put on the new. I guess maybe this is an example of that happening.”

“I can’t imagine giving all that up,” she said, wide-eyed. I couldn’t tell whether she was awed or horrified by the idea.  

Uncomfortably aware of the chipmunk-cheeked, full-screen photo of someone who looked vaguely like me watching on, like a third person in this conversation, I continued.

“Jesus said that if He makes us free, we’ll be free indeed,” I said. “And being free of cigarettes and alcohol is pretty cool. But it’s nothing compared with being free of the fear of death.”

She lifted her eyebrows at that one. “What do you mean? You’re not afraid of dying?”

“Not really,” I said. “I know I’m going to heaven, and it’s going to be unimaginably wonderful. But let me ask you this: Has anyone ever explained the Gospel to you?”

“Not really,” she said. “We weren’t really brought up that way.”

“Then let me tell you about it,” I said, and since she didn’t bolt or change the subject, I plunged ahead. I told her about how heaven is a free gift from God, how man is a sinner and can’t save himself, how God is not only totally loving but is also totally just and will not tolerate sin in His heaven.

“If that’s true, then I’m in trouble,” she said brightly. “I know I’ve sinned. And more than once.”

“Who hasn’t,” I said, “countless times?” I explained that sin means breaking any of God’s commandments – lying, for instance, or coveting what other people have, or failing to love the Lord with all one’s heart, soul, mind and strength. Then I delivered the good news about how God the Son had shown up on earth in the person of Jesus, had lived a perfect life in order to become the perfect sacrifice, had died a tortuous death on the cross to pay the penalty for our sins, and had risen after three days to defeat death once and for all.

“We sinned and God paid the penalty for us,” I concluded. “The book of Ephesians tells us, ‘For by grace you have been saved through faith, and that not of yourselves; it is the gift of God, not of works, lest anyone should boast.’ And we can receive that free gift by repenting – sorrowing over and turning from our sin – and by confessing Jesus Christ as our Savior and our Lord.”

But halfway through that last sentence, her eyes glazed over, and I knew I’d lost her.

“Well, that’s all very interesting,” she said, turning back to the computer screen and reaching for the mouse again. “I’m just not sure it’s for me.”

Sighing inwardly, I fished a gospel tract out of my purse. 

“Well, why don’t you give it some thought?” I said, handing her the tract, a great little synopsis of the gospel points I’d just covered. “Maybe take a look at this when you have a chance?”

“Sure, thanks,” she said, tucking it under her mouse pad. “But like I said, I don’t think I have anything to worry about; I’m really a good person. So, anyway, take a look at this shot – I think it’s pretty nice …”

I wondered if the tract would find its way into the wastebasket as soon as I walked out the door, and comforted myself with the thought that, if it did, a cleaning person might find it tonight.

Either way, God had promised: “My word will not return void.”

I left a few minutes later carrying a CD with a bunch of pictures that I wouldn’t want my dog to see (my fault, not hers) and feeling discouraged by her failure to jump for joy over the Gospel – or my failure to explain it coherently.

I was halfway home before I realized with a happy heart that God had done it again: in a snit, I’d asked him to get the photographer to bring up the subject of Him. He’d answered my prayer just like that.

"Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and comes down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow of turning." -- James 1:17
 
Thanks to the ongoing discovery of ancient manuscripts, both partial and full, we can rest assured that the Bible has not changed over the millennia. That means God has never amended or overturned anything that He revealed and commanded 2000 to 3500 years ago.
 
Alas, plenty of mere humans have done their best to do it for Him by amending or overturning a whole lot of Scripture – including, amazingly, people who claim to worship Him.
 
Consider, for example, those who insist that divorce is no longer an issue for Him. Some claim that God didn’t really mean it when He said that adultery is the only excuse for divorce, that it was just some wild idea promoted by that bitter old bachelor Paul. Others claim that the prohibition against divorce was meant for a day when women couldn’t fend for themselves – not a problem for us moderns. Still others say that God’s #1 priority is their happiness, and since their spouses are making them unhappy, the only thing to do is to throw the bums out. “God understands,” they murmur in their sweetest voices.
 
Then there are modern couples who insist that happy marriages mandate a 50/50 division of authority.  So what if Colossians 3 commands a wife to submit to her husband? Sure, her husband is commanded in turn to love her with sacrificial, godly love. But what difference does that make if she doesn’t get an equal-or-better say-so in all their life decisions? “After all, that stuff was written a long time ago,” a thrice-married wife once informed me, “when women were mealy-mouthed little know-nothings. We’ve come a long way, baby, and I’m running the show now!”
 
The trouble is, God has already issued very clear commands covering every decision we will ever have to make in life, often with explanations and examples of obedience and disobedience. If we can be bothered to look, we can't really miss it. 

What’s more, ignorance of His law is no excuse: He delivered it all in under 800,000 words, roughly the length of Joseph McElroy’s landmark novel Women and Men (1987, Knopf).  We are indeed without excuse.

But how do we sophisticates treat it?
 
Too often, by tweaking the commands that we don’t feel like obeying, and tossing others out wholesale. We then rationalize our edits with whatever man-made loophole looks most convincing to us at the moment.
 
Unfortunately, when we do this, we are breaking the first commandment: “You shall have no other gods before Me.”  We are essentially making up gods to suit ourselves, which is idolatry.
 
Next time you’re tempted to ignore Him in favor of your own wishes, stop and think a moment: Is this desire so important that it’s worth another black mark on His record of my life? Is it worth losing a reward in heaven – or suffering even greater punishment in hell?
 
Not sure which will be your ultimate, eternal destination? Don’t wait another day! Get right with God right now. Then let His unchanging word guide you for the duration. You will never regret it.