Me: I have a thought that we can hold on to today.
Prodigal: I am ready to listen.
Me: The Lord has defended you in battles you don’t even know about.
This is from Julia Tinkey
There’s something about a hospital in the dead of night that is different from anything else–muted sighs and stirrings, the light from the nurse’s station at the end of the floor.
I sat by Mother’s bed, watching. There wasn’t much else I could do. Jean Hudson, the night nurse, was in and out, checking Mother’s pulse and blood pressure.
In fact, as the minutes crawled past, I grew more and more sensitive to the impulse that had made me leave my husband and our three children asleep and drive to the hospital at midnight. We’d known for six weeks that Mother was dying. Ever since surgery had revealed inoperable cancer, I’d spent part of each day at her side. This night I had to be with her.
It was true, the last few days she’d been failing rapidly, in much pain, drifting in and out of a coma. Several times the doctor had been on the verge of telling her that further treatment was useless–but we all hesitated. All her life Mother had been such an active person, teaching at the high school, running the farm, doing office work for dad’s pulpwood business, raising five children, and cheerfully taking on jobs at church. To be able to fight now, however vainly, we felt was important to her.
She still had not moved nor opened her eyes since I arrived. I repeated again the prayer I had said so often in that room. It was that Mother not have to go with drugs numbing that close harmony of mind to mind and heart to heart we had always had in our family. As I had done daily the past six weeks, I prayed that Mother–who had served God so faithfully these seventy years—be allowed to come to Him in dignity and acceptance and peace.
“Julia!” Mother stirred on the bed, “Are you there, Julia?”
I assured her that I was, and she asked me to come closer. She wanted to apologize, she said, for having been so difficult (which of course she hadn’t).
Her eyes opened; they looked straight into mine. “The doctor told me. And, Julia, it’s all right. I’ve left it up to God. I’m in God’s hands now, and it is so wonderful.”
As she was saying this, she seemed bathed in light. As I stared at her, the mysterious radiance enveloped me as well; I felt as if I were drowning in the love and joy on her face.
I realized that she was smiling and I smiled back–but I could not express this awareness enough through smiles; it seemed that my body must burst with the fullness of that instant.
The instant stretched into minutes and the minutes into almost an hour as we looked at each other, exposed and filled with the living presence of God. I felt that Mother was seeing a world beyond the physical one, and that I was almost there with her.
I said to her, “Do you mean, Mother, that you see God?” and she answered, “Yes, Julia, face to face, and it is so important that everyone know. Tell Murray, Carol, Miriam, George,” naming my brothers and sisters. “It’s so wonderful!”
She seemed so alert, so like her former self that in frustration I almost shouted at her. “What’s so wonderful? Tell me!”
“Millions and millions of people,” she began slowly. “So many millions….and all on different levels. There’s light….light everywhere….so much light!”
Her eyes seemed so full of love and they never left mine. Her voice remained strong as she continued. “Things get between us and God. Tell them all not to let things separate them from God. I’ve been so concerned with my own little problems and desires. Tell them, Julia–the glory of the Lord–it is wonderful!”
They were the last words that Mother spoke. Her eyes closed, but the smile did not fade.
Now the things which I write unto you, behold, before God, I lie not. Galatians 1:20 (KJV)
Jennifer Van Allen
www.theprodigalpig.com
www.faithincounseling.org
