Previous Challenge Entry (Level 4 – Masters)
Topic: PAIN (04/21/22)
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TITLE: Morning Joy | Previous Challenge Entry
By Jennifer Percell
04/28/22 -
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My tears fall on the steering wheel. My prayer isn’t made of words, but of crying out to the One Who Hears. Months have become years and this hard season shows no sign of ending. All I can think about is how much I love my daughters and how much I miss them. Since they decided that the world had so much to offer they don’t share their lives with us much anymore. Visits are stilted and awkward. I never imagined life this way.
The nursing home has new staff and they have doubted every decision I have made for my sister’s care. They condense five years of agony into, “your sister seems healthy to us. We haven’t read her medical charts but we feel you have done her a disservice by putting her here.” I think of a lot of responses to that statement that are not holy. Since when did nurses not have to read the medical charts?
Ten new shots in my back yesterday have left me stiff and hurting. School will be hard today. Only 15 days until I retire but it feels so much longer. This three year illness has changed my work plans drastically. There is just too much pain to get through the days. My faithful husband is doing everything at home and it’s wearing him down.
Five dear friends are so sick, cancer, strokes, heart disease. The war is unthinkable and I can only be a heartbroken witness when I want to be on the ground serving.
And then I drive on to the bridge. All the mornings, day after day, my faithful God meets me at the river. Somedays I find myself almost holding my breath at the last stop light before the bridge, will He still greet me? The Missouri river sparkles with the sunrise, crashes with floes of ice, or is only a ghost shrouded by deep fog, but it never, never fails to meet me. The river my God created for me.
Then He shows me the open fields of Kansas and often deer, hawks or massive flocks of geese. Today He gives me the gentle green of emerging spring leaves and the black mounds of plowed fields. The Voice I crave to hear seems to sing the morning song. As my prayer seemed to not have words, this song of God has no audible speech.
As David tells us in Psalm 19, about the message of the heavens; “They have no speech, they use no words; no sound is heard from them. Yet their voice goes out into all the earth, their words to the end of the world.” He goes on to speak of how the sun makes its circuit and nothing is deprived of its warmth. This warmth settles in my breast with a deep sigh of relief.
My tears are dried by springtime and hope and the countless beautiful gifts that the Creator set before me to lead me through this day.
He starts with delightful gifts of morning light and then graduates to smiling, funny children and long awaited breakthroughs in learning. He throws in thoughtful co-workers and bits of good news and I remember that all good things come from God.
I park the car and smile at the bunny in the school yard. I whisper my hushed thanks as my Lord walks with me into the school. For in this season I have learned that the suffering Savior, the Man of Sorrows teaches those who suffer with Him how to see the deepest Joy that only He can pour into an open heart.
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