Waiting for the Amen …

It’s 3:00 on Thursday morning. I should be in bed, but the words are keeping me awake.

Words I do not want to write.

The dash on my mother’s timeline is getting closer to having a date on the right side.

March 14, 1926 – ?

“God, I’m not ready for the date to be filled in, but I know my mother is ready. Ready in so many ways. Please Lord, allow her to fall, ever so gently, into your arms.” I wipe tears as I pray this prayer.

I want to push the sand in my mother’s hourglass back up into the top. I know that is not possible.

There are words I want to say to her as I hold her hand. I’ve said them before but I want her to hear them again. Covid forbids it. Damn you, Covid! Damn you for what you have done to this world! Damn you for what you have done to my mother!

Covid, my mother survived you but she cannot survive the complications you have left upon her. The blood clots in her frail body have given her a death sentence. It wasn’t supposed to be this way.

So many chapters in my mother’s story have the words “it’s not supposed to be this way” written in them.

So many times, her life was not easy. So many detours. So many interruptions. So many broken roads.

Her story, as she would tell it, always had a “but God” in it.

But God … brought me a baby, named Janet, after fourteen years of waiting.

But God … healed my husband of cancer when the doctors said he needed a miracle. He got one.

But God … allowed me to live to be 94.

I saw how her faith was lived every day of my life.

I remember hearing her pray as she knelt beside her bed every night, “Dear God, watch over my family.” She would say my name and over the years I know she added name after name as our family grew. She made sure that God knew our names.

I remember her sitting at the kitchen table, every morning, with her coffee and her Bible. She read the scriptures. She taught them to me. Coffee and the scriptures were her sacred morning ritual. I, now, repeat that ritual.

“Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil.” I hear those words in my heart as I struggle through the days I’m living now.

My mother raised me to not see death as the final chapter but as the beginning of eternal life.

I know what it means to sing … “A thrill of hope, the weary world rejoices.” I heard that hope in my mother’s alto voice as she sang in the church choir every Christmas.

You see, my mother taught me what it meant to sing, “Let every heart prepare Him room.” Those were not just words in a pretty Christmas carol. It is how she lived her life. “Always leave room for Jesus.”

Mom showed me the wonders of God’s love. She will continue to show me in ways after she falls into the arms of Jesus.

The scripture says, “Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life, and I will dwell in the house of the Lord, forever. Amen.”

“Mom, it’s time for your Amen. Give Dad a hug for me when you see him. I’ll see you both later.”

Soon my mother will be sleeping in heavenly peace. My Bible tells me so … and so did my mother.