Words never stop being vibrations in the air, or lines on a page; but wrapped around an image that people can see with their eyes shut, they can last forever.

The ways in (to heaven) are the witnesses who first told the story of salvation. Believing the story, and being a character in the story, therefore, is the way in. And seeing such people is what will persuade the nations to believe the story and come in, too.

If you read the Bible closely, you will find many hundreds of people whose names get lost in the credits, who appear to be no more than props in the story, and yet there would ne no story without them. That is almost all of us.

When families and parishes, schools and universities, hospitals and missions, are focused on the living God and Him alone, the cultures they create will form billions of people for centuries, even as civilizations, empires, republics, and presidents rise and fall.

Moral and theological propositions don’t become true for us just because of the words. We look at who is speaking those words, what effect those words have had on her/him, what we can reasonably predict would happen to us, our homes, our culture if we adopted the same words.

Witnesses have a lifetime commitment to Jesus in Scripture, Jesus in the Sacraments, Jesus in prayer, Jesus in evangelization. That’s not just a skill, but a life. Witnesses like that don’t just have a mission. They are a mission.

St Elizabeth is one of many nameless or nearly nameless people in the Bible, the kind whose names appear late in the credits of movies, if they appear at all, just below “man in bar” and “assistant key grip.” Yet it is part of the humor of God that these people wind up being the ones whose words and witness frame our knowledge of the saving plan of God.