Heart of God

Not sure if you have heard of having a Memorial Box for your family.  I heard about it a few months ago and I think it is the neatest idea!

Man I missed Monday AGAIN!  but I am posting this anyways!

This Memorial Box  story is represented by a RED GLASS HEART!

“Jen wake up!” She hears the words but she is dazed as she awakes from the much needed nap.  “Is she dead?”  She asks.  He leaves the room only to return with a solemn look and a nod.  She weeps, not for the mother she has lost but for the girl that is left behind.  It seems so long ago that she was a happy newlywed without a care in the world, though it was only two and a half short years ago.  How things change. 

Now the marriage seems like a farce and her only parent is gone.  “What am I going to do?” she asks herself.  She looks down at her mother.  She grasps her mother’s palm, gently removing the red glass heart that had been placed there for her by a friend to, quote “hold on to the heart of God.”  It was still warm.  Surely she is not gone.  She had heard of people hovering over their dead body in near death experiences.  Could she be seen by her dead mother?  She better straighten up.  Chris Wright was a strong woman determined to be independent.  She would want her only daughter to be strong, in control, and unemotional.  But she could not hold back the tears.  Though selfishly she was only crying for herself, it was too late for her mother. 

She looks around the small room that used to be an office; now conveniently converted into a mother-in-law suite.  Things foreign to her home now presided over the room: a hospital bed, bedside commode, many medicine bottles just steep reminders that her old life was gone.  She remembers back to a few weeks ago when she had fought with her mother. She was cleaning the room and her mother was not as big a fan of tidiness as her daughter.  She asked her to stop, “just let me finish.” Her mother looked annoyed at the response but said nothing.  Later after she had bathed her mother they were working together to get her dressed. She was just trying to help when her mother responded harshly with “let me do it myself!”  To which she replied “I just want to help you, it would be so much easier for you if you would let someone help you!”  Her mother responded angrily and it shocked her “You are cleaning my room when I don’t want you too, touching my stuff, and I can’t even take a shit without you there, you have to bathe me. I just want to try to do it myself”  “Mother you have two broken arms, why do you have to be so difficult?  Why can’t you let someone help you?”  Her mother began to cry in a way that she had not heard in a long time.  Only a few times had she had the opportunity to see her mother cry.  But she had heard this cry before it was a broken hearted weeping last heard when her mother had lost her mother.  She was not expecting this.  She remembers her mother pointing for her to leave and she obeyed; then went to her room a fell across the bed and wept for her mother and prayed.

She glances around the room and pauses as she looks at the door and is reminded that she came back to her mother and asked if she could explain.  Her mother obliged.   “Mom, Your whole life you have done everything for yourself. You raised yourself, you raised your sister, and you raised me.  You have always done everything for me I ever needed.  Will you let me return the favor?  I feel helpless in the situation and the least I can do is help you take care of yourself. I want to.  We need each other and God isn’t going to let you die until you let someone do something for you!” She hated that she had brought God into it.  She wasn’t completely sure how her mother felt about God.  How could this be such an important topic and she was afraid to discuss it with her mother.  She knew her mother had had her baptized as a baby, and was not antagonistic when as a young teen she had told her about her committing her life to Christ and being baptized in the Atlantic Ocean; but she also knew that this was the same mother that had never been to church with her, who she had never heard pray, and that when they found out she was over 5 months pregnant had said “if you had told me about this sooner we could have done something about this” implying abortion.  These last few months of dehumanizing cancer had turned her mother into something entirely different than she was before:  Someone completely dependent on another person for the most basic of human needs.  She realizes as she sits alone, that that conversation as painful as it was was a healing experience for both of them.  She was glad she had said that because from that point on things had been easier. 

As she sits in the chair beside her mothers bed looking upon the shell of her mother’s body she realizes her whole life all she ever wanted was to be loved.  That is why she fell on the ground and begged for Jesus to enter her heart because the minister said “He would never leave us or forsake us and loved us as we were”  That is why when a young man paid her attention she gave her heart away without thought or care.  She remembers three days earlier she heard the words she always wanted her mother to say.  As a young girl she would say them to her mother and wait only to be disappointed that they were not reciprocated.  Paramedics were bringing her mother in through the back door of the house.  They had brought her home to die.  That is what she wanted.  She was very heavily medicated for the trip to try to make it as comfortable for her as possible.  She had been in a great deal of pain as the cancer had eaten through her bones causing fractures.  As they wheeled her into her room she opened her eyes and looked around and an overwhelming look of peace passed over her mother’s face.  Her mother looked into her eyes and mumbled three tiny words that will forever reverb through her life as the three greatest words.  Though her mother was heavily medicated and her speech was slurred the young woman knew with everything that was within her what her mother had said… “I love you”. Her mother never spoke again or awoke fully again.  As she sit starring at what was not her mother at all, but something like a shadow, she knew she was loved.  She knew she had always been loved, but something about those three words, she knew that only God knew how badly she needed to hear them. She knew that they had to have come from Him, the one who infinitely loved her.  She rose leaned over her dead mother and gently kissed her hand and said I love you.  Then she held up what was in her hand, gave the red object a good look and then tightly grasped “the heart of God.”