Here’s the Story of a Lovely Lady

This is  a story about my mother.

It’s long, but I want you to read it.

I could tell you about her faith, her enormous creativity, her strength in the face of many challenges, her fabulous pound cake.

But not today.

Today I want to tell you a time when she went very far away from herself, and we feared we would not get her back.

I want to tell you how, in that very dark place,  her Jesus showed up.

A few years ago, my father, her husband of 57 years, passed away.  He was 87, a compromised lung patient, so while the illness was short, his death was not unexpected in one sense.

My mother had been a strong believer in Christ for many years,  so somehow we missed that his passing would cut her loose from her moorings.

Over time, she slipped into a dark, secret world inhabited by fear.

Yet, even when her grief dredged the bottom of its depth, the Holy Spirit in her called across the deep water.  We sat on her porch, singing snatches of old hymns, me reading scriptures over and over to her.

“The darkness is not dark to You.  The night is as light to You.”

Through those days, Psalm 23 glowed white-hot from the page.

“He prepares a table before me in the presence of my enemies.”

The Bread of Life, the New Wine, broken and poured out for her, for me.  In the presence of her enemy (where he was forced to watch),  her sweet Jesus spread a candle-lit banquet table, and we ate.

It would be months before the light shone bright out of my mother’s life again.  If you met her today, taking charge at her retirement home, you would not know the shadow she had walked through.

Mercifully, she doesn’t remember those days.

But I do.

And I thank Him for the Table. 

Happy Mother’s Day

Ginger

Linking up at Chatting in the Sky:Tuesdays Unwrapped