Dear Anne,
Every telling of forgiveness edges out the darkness of sin and despair. It is so hard to know when God is telling one to get up and move in a particular direction. Those moments of discernment matter, but very little about the world we live in helps us to make those discerning acts. Sometimes, when we get it right and the world feels beautifully in sync with the Father’s will, there still is pain. We were spending the most difficult year of our lives (to that point) in Virginia when my mother was close to death here in Canada, although with her heart history, none of us could know that. I phoned her and we had a love-filled conversation. Her last words to me were, “Thank God for a daughter like you.” And I answered, “Thank God for a mother like you. I’ll call again tomorrow.” But before I could, the call came that she had died that morning. If I had flown north a week earlier, we could have spent precious time together, but my husband and I had weighed the issues and felt if she should die before the family could return, I would be needed more for the survivors at a funeral and that Mum would be OK with her Lord. It turned out that my father’s last few days with her were more necessary and important than anything I would have received or given.
Twice following her death God led me to be with one of her relatives who was near death, although in neither case could I know their days were numbered. Before leaving her oldest sister in the nursing home where she had lived for 20 years, I ventured to ask if she would like me to pray with her and she did. When the Amens had been said, as I stood at the end of her bed saying goodby, she shocked me by echoing my mother’s words, “Thank God for a niece like you.” That was the last time I saw her.
On the second occasion, I was already in bed on a blustery winter’s night in our Ontario farmhouse when a strong, clear urge to go to mother’s sister-in-law in Quebec hit me. My beloved husband thought I’d lost my mind. We waited and prayed for an hour before he realized I had to go. I awakened our (at that time schizophrenic) son to come with me as a younger pair of eyes in the darkness and storm. We drove through the storm that was still fierce the following morning , arriving at my aunt’s door in Sherbrooke just as a nurse inside was explaining to her that she had metastasized cancer and would need to go into palliative care immediately. I was less shocked, when we were preparing to return the following day, when she said to me, “Thank God for a niece like you.” I look rather like my mother and I think, for my aunt, my visit was much as though my mother had come to her at that point of critical need.
I have to make those kinds of decisions often. I am in the midst of a couple or three crises right now that require agonizing patience, waiting on God’s timing not my own, when people I love are in terrible jeopardy. Listening for His voice, not my own or those around me, is more difficult now that the pain and creakiness of age cries out to sit still. Knowing that life-and-death matters are being weighed in the balances and that God has a right path through each mess is my best hope. And that if I fail, forgiveness has always been waiting for me. Thank you for renewing that message and strengthening my heart.
Laurna
