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TITLE: Sister Selma By Holly Howard 06/16/06 |
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Sister Selma by Holly Howard
Residents of northern Illinois raked through their closets in search of wool sweaters, thermals and down comforters. For a gelid north wind had blown in and chilled the bones of every living creature. Its icy blast jerked the branches of grieving trees whose foliage was already mulch for next year’s gardens. Winter had already set one of its heavy feet on the ground and the other was likely to come down any day. It was two weeks before Thanksgiving. My mother was feeling numb all over, but it had nothing to do with the change of weather.
I was only five-years-old then, and I had been in a hospital bed for tens days, chained to an IV that had been pumping a million units of penicillin daily into my frail body. I had been in a coma this whole time, absorbing medicine that had been of no help to my condition. I had acute bacterial Meningitis, and it was proving to be terminal.
I was a patient at St. Joseph’s Children’s Hospital; a Catholic medical center filled with icons of and adheres to the Catholic religion. Sister Selma was my night nurse. She was a dedicated nun who worshiped an omnipotent God who preformed miracles. Both her medical and spiritual education told her that my mother was in dire of need of a miracle right now. She was determined to help my mother find one.
Little did Sister Selma know however, that my mother, agonizing by my bedside in my hospital room, had no faith at all in the miraculous and had no belief whatsoever in God. My mother’s only hope for my recovery had been in the physicians and in their pharmacy of miracle drugs. Yet now, even the medical experts had given up hope that I might recover. Just that morning my primary doctor had told my parents that I might not survive the night.
Skeptics, agnostics, and even those who define religion as a crutch for the weak, often begin petitioning one or more gods when confronted with this type of crisis. Not my mother. Sister Selma and my mother were like warm and cold fronts, moving in from different directions, and their collision would produce quite a storm.
Sister Selma entered my hospital room without introduction and approached my mother, and without a bit of hesitation, spoke her mind. “You need to pray,” she said to my mother, with deep-seated conviction. God is your only hope.”
My mother’s blood began to boil instantly. Indignation caused my atheist mother’s face to grimace. How dare this Catholic nurse, whom she did not even know, suggest she pray?
“What kind of God strikes down a little girl?” my mother barked at her, venting years of devoted atheism. (My mom believed any God capable of healing her daugher must have also caused her condition).
“You need to pray." Sister Selma said again without resignation. "She is going to die.” Then Sister Selma marched out of the room.
Filled with a rage and a defiance against a God she did not even believe existed, my mother took a hold of one of my big toes, for it was one of only a few parts of my body that was free from tubes and wires. She looked out the window at the world, which was now disappearing under darkness.
Then my mother shook her fist at Sister Selma’s God. “How could you strike down my little girl like this?” my mother cried out to Him, in the privacy of her mind. “Prove to me you are real, she demanded. Prove to me you care,” she dared Him. “Heal my daughter!”
If you quake just thinking about speaking to God in such a manner, you should. God deserves our reverence. He gives us life, breath, and everything else. He owes us nothing. Yet, God is merciful, and He knows who will come to faith in Christ. Many of them, like my mother, are driven to Him by a storm.
With her heart full of anguish and her eyes blurred by tears, my mom left my hospital room to go an appointment with her therapist. When she returned to the hospital ward, several ecstatic nurses immediately greeted her and asked her where she had been.
“As soon as you left, she came out of her coma,” they told her. God had indeed preformed a miracle.
The miracle of my healing continued. The medical specialist’s prognosis for me, if I ever recovered from my coma, was that I would be mostly brain-dead and incapable of a normal life. When this theory proved false, they told my parents I would never walk again. Yet, I defied all odds because the Great Physician had completely healed me. (My primary doctor, who was Jewish, acknowledged that my complete recovery was due to God’s intervention).
Sister Selma, a Catholic nun, planted seeds of faith in the heart of my mother that awesome day. Faith that prompted prayer and produced a miracle. I am here and writing this story because she told my mom to pray. Over time, my mother came to faith in Christ and I did as well. As for Sister Selma, I can only hope that one day that she put her faith in Christ, instead of Mary, for her salvation.
Note: Sister Selma gave me a stuffed tiger before I left the hospital. I named him George. I still have him. He was my favorite stuffed toy as a child..
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