Monumental Milestone | Previous Challenge Entry

how it works

TITLE: Monumental Milestone | Previous Challenge Entry
By Glen Goddard
10/20/15
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My younger brother and I flew down to Florida about 15 years ago to see our Mother. Arriving at the airport, I rented a car and drove to the hospital. She had just been admitted again for a reoccurring brain tumor. Years before this she had undergone the surgeon's knife and he had extracted the tumor. But he told us prophetically at the time, that there was a relatively great chance that it would grow back. Now the Doctors were telling us that it was inoperable.

For the first couple of days, when we not at the hospital, we spent hanging out at our favorite pier waiting for the battery of tests and consultations to be completed. We talked about how Mother had been a pillar in the family and her church. She was a model of the kind of woman that King Lemuel talks about in Proverbs 31. She 'walked the talk' of her Christian faith. Mother always honored Dad. She was the one that family looked to for solutions. She was the one who seemed to have the wisest counsel. She was a gracious and compassionate yet strong woman. Life threw some tough circumstances her way and yet we remembered how she always talked about the joy she had in knowing Jesus. We shared memories of us two boys giving her grief as we tried to find our way into adulthood. Through it all we remembered Mother exhibiting a never-ending quality of unconditional love.

Several days later, after the battery of tests, consultations and the three of us weighing options, my brother and I made arrangements to move Mother to a nursing home. She more than agreed since she was experiencing tell-tale signs that the tumor was affecting her memory and ability to live alone. She told us clearly that she knew that the end was near and that she was trusting Jesus with joy in her heart in this circumstance just like she had practiced all of these years.

The day arrived clear and sunny to take Mother to the nursing home. While I went to get the car, my brother brought her down to the curb in a wheel chair. I pulled up and we gently got Mother into the front seat of the car. My brother took the wheel chair back to the entrance and I closed the door. Walking around the front of the car to the driver's side, I looked in through the windshield at Mother. Instead of seeing my Mother, I saw this little old frail woman. Like a thunder bolt out of the blue, I suddenly saw with clarity what she had been hinting at for almost a year. What I saw and understood for the first time was that the roles had now been reversed. She was the 'child' and I was the 'parent.' I now had to be the strong one for her. That moment of clarity became a monumental milestone in my journey toward the City of God where she now resides.

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