Devotion 332 - Words

I wanted to rewrite the story and the timing.

I answered my phone.  My precious aunt,  Daddy’s beloved sister had passed into eternity.  In many ways she had taught me what it was to be a woman with a fierce and unfailing faith.

I could see her standing before Jesus.  In some time ahead, I will be ecstatically happy to know her suffering has ended.  She is reunited with her beloved husband who single handedly had ushered my husband into our family.  Brian and my uncle had connected.  They both loved their Savior and they both adored singing about Him.

I remember that first family reunion that I was married.  My uncle and my husband singing together at our makeshift Sunday service.   In every way, Brian had been adopted in the family.  This seemed the celebration song.

Yes, one day I will think of her illness ending and the glory beginning but it was not this day.  The pain delivered in those words squeezed my heart.  Daddy could barely say them.  One of his little sisters now joined all of his brothers.  I could hear the unanswered questions of “why her?”  And “how much will he and us will miss her?”

I hung up my mobile phone to pick up my desk phone.  It was a conference call with a physician.  It was not bad news, not life threatening news, just news that would change our direction.  News that I did not expect.

Test results that came in a sterile little bottle with no cotton on the top.  Just words that floated into my ears that had yet recovered from the news of death.

They were words about a child I adore.

I hung up the phone, this second phone call and the tears overwhelmed me.  My face burned with the unexpected nature of both reports.

In three hours we would be boarding a plane to go to a different country.  In two hours I would be scurrying about my house thinking of every last minute everything that six people need, but in no more than ten minutes, a part of my life had changed.

I would miss the funeral.

I took out a card and wrote some words down.  It was a balm to my soul.  Strange, in one moment words cut, in another they heal.

John tells us, The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.   John 1:14

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The Word, the flesh, was cut and killed, to bring healing and wholeness, forgiveness for forever.  Perhaps that is what He meant when He called His Beloved Son the Word.

Words, such a simple breeze that can open the gates to life or to death.  Words…do we use them to worship or wound?

Words. 

I thought about the words that my aunt had shared with me.  She always, always greeted me with a kiss.  She always left me with a kiss.  And at the bottom of every glass of her iced tea was a mountain of sugar.  That was life as she knew it.  It grew sweeter as her love for her Lord grew stronger.

Perhaps that was the message.  Perhaps her actions to embrace life and find the sweet were the way I would get through this new challenge with this dear child.

The words, the two messages were not delivered together by some rogue messenger of fate.  It was the Father knitting the two together so I would tie my Aunt’s wisdom to my current worry.

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Find the sweet, embrace life until the very last drop, both in its coming AND in its going.

Those words will guide me. 

“For as the rain and the snow come down from heaven and do not return there but water the earth, making it bring forth and sprout, giving seed to the sower and bread to the eater, so shall my word be that goes out from my mouth; it shall not return to me empty, but it shall accomplish that which I purpose, and shall succeed in the thing for which I sent it.”   Isaiah 55:10-11