Previous Challenge Entry (Level 2 – Intermediate)
Topic: Mother (as in maternal parent) (04/24/08)
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TITLE: She's Yours Lord | Previous Challenge Entry
By Catherine Craig
04/30/08 -
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Spoken seemingly eons ago now, Mom’s impulsive words rankle in my head. I sit here at my desk staring blankly at an empty computer screen, picturing her as she is today - shriveled, fighting for breath, riddled with cancer, stretched out on a hospital bed several thousand miles away.
Just like her father so long ago.
Was it thirty years ago we hustled him to the same building, his body also peppered with cancer and lungs filled with fluid?
Where did the years all go?
"Why does she have to suffer so!” Heartbroken, I whisper the words in the emptiness of my quiet room but the answering silence seems to mock me. I close my eyes, willing the clock to turn backward to another time when personal matters didn't send shudders through me.
An old picture I'd stashed away in an album comes to mind as I wonder what to do next. I remember the black and white photo of my mother tidily summed her up in its tiny square frame: chocolate brown eyes rolled upward in an amused expression on a face framed with soft wavy dark hair, as if the photographer had just caught her with a funny thought.
Gentle, quick to chuckle. That's Mom.
Introverted, shy, closed. Gracious but immovable, often impenetrable. I'm not sure that any of us, even as her own children, understand her.
She's so hard to reach and Lord knows how I've tried to speak to her about God!
Other memories, triggered by that photograph, make me pause in the midst of my dark musings to smile: Mom eating a hot dog with a splotch of gooey ketchup smeared across her cheek; another time the two of us sat eating enormous dripping ice cream cones, watching, amused, as others nibbled at theirs.
Mom and I have things in common now, two of which we always knew were inevitable, but that somehow tiptoed into our lives unbidden, uninvited: #1. We both fight stubborn gray hairs that challenge our efforts to hide them. #2. Our joints hurt and knees protest as we hobble up and down stairs.
The third, I would rather she not have shared with me: cancer.
She was diagnosed last year three weeks before I was, but has in her own way tried to avoid its ugly reality. Faced it but believed it would go away.
Hers didn't, but mine did. It's not fair.
"She's not ready to go into eternity Lord!" I whisper again. “Take me instead, or show me how to reach her! I'm ready to go; she isn't.” Only silence greets the guttural cry wrenched from a place deep within me known only to God, “I don't want to say good-bye to her forever Lord; she's my MOM!”
Resignedly I pick up the phone to call a local church in her area, but pause with my hand on the handset as, like butter melted over a piece of toast, a peculiar calm settles over me.
I’d forgotten that God loves her too.
His heart aches for her, and for me. He’s seen all the times in the past she has said “No.” to Him; He hasn’t given up on her anymore than I have. He’s seen all the creative ways I’ve tried to share Him with her. He knows.
As I finish this manuscript, my pain hasn’t magically disappeared, but my hope increases with each tap of my fingers skipping over the keyboard. Refreshed I ease the burden of my Mom’s eternal future onto God’s Shoulders and pray:
“God, You Love my mother with a passionate perfect love – so infinitely deeper than mine. You understanding is unfathomable; You know the shackles on her spirit that keep her from You. I entrust her into Your hands now. She's Your responsibility now, not mine. She never was just mine to worry about. You’ve been here all along.
I'll trust You with her now Lord. For Eternity."
Amen.
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I have prayed for her openness, and for God's wisdom as you reflect Him.