This morning I attended a recovery meeting using the technology of the phone bridge. Present at the meeting were more than thirty participants from all spiritual walks of life. The reading for this meeting came from an AA piece of literature called “Came to Believe.” I listened as one participant after another took part in reading a story about a man whose wife had been diagnosed with cancer. Instead of resorting to his former means of coping, God guided him to seek fellowship in AA. His AA friends encouraged him to pray for the power to accept the will of God in regard to the life or death of his wife. The story concludes in great happiness. The man’s wife was blessed with the gift of health and life and they went on to enjoy many happy sober days together.
As I listened my thoughts were driven to my own experience with my father who, in the spring of 1970 was diagnosed with cancer. Today is Memorial Day. It’s the day we all travel to the grave where my mother and my Grandpa and Grandma and a batch of seven little children ages 3 to 16 placed his body in the summer of 1971.
As I listened to the reading I thought, “Nannette, you need to share your experience with the many people listening in at this meeting. Your story did not end like the one being read, but tell all the people listening in at 5:00 am on a Memorial Day morning that your experience with the blessing of God was no less miraculous.”
I gathered my courage. “I’d like to share,” I ventured in. For the next three minutes I told the friends I only know by voice and not by face of my father’s illness. I spoke of the positive mental attitude – the “I know that he will live” - kind of faith I tried to hang on to through the year he was so very sick. I told them how finally, as a family, in prayer, we became willing to completely turn our will and his life over to the care of God and that God took him home.
Then I testified, not of the Lord’s power to heal and restore life, although I know He surely can, but that He can and does and did in the case of our family, bless us in the face of great tragedy. We were given power from above just a surely as if we had been given life itself. The miracle God had in store for us was the heart, might, mind, and strength to go on living. He did not preserve the life of my Father, but He filled us, the living, with that peace “that passeth understanding.” He surrounded us with human sustenance in the form of family and friends whose love and support has been endless, and He illuminated the way before us. The Lord witnessed to us that because of His great redeeming sacrifice our Dad would Live On and that He could and would help us to Go On. The Lord’s power to heal is very real, but the most common miracle, the one that we may each experience in this life is the renewal of our own lives in the face of great loss and the power the live on!
By Nannette W.
Posted Monday, May 25, 2009
Copyright 2008 by Nannette W. All rights reserved. Making or sending copies is permitted if the page is not changed in any way and the material is not used for profit. This notice must be included on each copy made or sent.
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2 comments:
I bet that touched a lot of people yesterday. Your faith and testimony are so strong, and your loving personality combines with that to speak to so many people's hearts.
I was lucky enough to hear your share that morning and I sure appreciated hearing your experience with surrender to God's will. That meeting had a good feeling to it and I think it is because we were discussing relationships that continue on in the eternities.
God bless you.
Jan
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