Happy Wednesday!

This morning a year ago Casey was alive. Before I go to bed tonight, a year ago, Casey was gone. Bruce and I lay in bed wide awake last night and commented that a year ago we were just as awake. We had gone many hours without sleep from Thursday to Tuesday. In fact one of the nurses came into Casey’s room and said that she would stay in the room with her computer to monitor Casey if we would just go to sleep. And Casey was once again in the middle. He loved to be between Bruce and me. We slept in chairs on either side of his bed for a few hours that night.

Luke 8:50 “Do not be afraid. Just believe…

I remember being in Arlington memorial hospital 25 years ago and saying to myself “today, our baby will be born.” And 24 years later I stood at that child’s bedside in Arlington Memorial Hospital and wondered, “Will my child die today?”

In Max Lucado’s book “Cast of Characters” , Max tells the story of the daughter of Jarius in a modern setting. He tells the story through the eyes of a pastor named Wallace whose daughter is dying. Wallace hears of a healer. As a pastor he has always disdained “faith healers” as the parasites of the pastorate. But in his feelings of hopelessness and desperation he seeks the healer. “What choice do I have?” He locates the Healer in a bus station dressed in average dress with a slightly receding hairline but a shock of long brown curls. Wallace looks at the face of the Healer and realizes that in this very average looking man, he has seen those eyes before. The Healer is pressed out of the bus station by the crowd and Wallace fights his way through the crowd to get close enough to the Healer, but before Wallace reaches the Healer, the Healer stops and says that someone has touched him. The Healer then asks who has touched him and a young woman answers, “It was me. I have AIDS. I just wanted to know if you could make me well.” The healer then tells her she is healed and to go and sin no more.

Now Wallace is angry. Here was one who has “needle-tracked arms and midnight lovers” and she is saved. But he also realizes they have much in common’ “What choice did she have?” And yet even though Wallace had never seen this young woman before, he knew he has seen her eyes.

Just as Wallace has finally arrived at the side of the Healer and is about to beg him for the life of his daughter someone runs up to him and says “Your daughter is dead.” The Healer tells Wallace that his daughter is not dead, but simple sleeping. Wallace and the Healer run to the hospital where his wife and others from the church are there trying to comfort each other. Wallace and the healer walk into the hospital room that holds the still body of his daughter, lays his hands upon her and called to her, “Princess, get up.” This young girl got up from her bed and walked into the arms of her family.

Sometime later Wallace finally remembered where he had seen those eyes; those piercing eyes of compassion, the eyes that held the secret of eternity, the eyes that promised healing, Wallace has seen them the day before in the eyes of one of his parishioners who lay in the hospital with cancer and told him, “I’m ready to go.”

I saw those eyes reflected in Casey in our last conversation when he told me, “Mom, it won’t be long and I am not afraid.”

“Take joy in the journey, son, and I will see you someday. I love you.”

Love you all, Gaylene.

Gcapplenotes@aol.com

I am not moved by what I see. I am not moved by what I feel. I am moved only by what I believe and I believe God.