pieces and ponderings

Yesterday I shared a little bit about my Aunt Barbara.  I did that so I could share a portion of something that she sent me the other day in our circle of writing life (see previous entry).  My Aunt Barbara has taught me much about endurance in life…I think you will see why.

“For a while now I have thought of my receiving polio as akin to my picking up a basket partially filled with odd looking items which I could not name.  The basket was not attractive, but it seemed to be what I needed.   As I went along, it gave me a handy place to put the “stuff” I picked up along the way.   Pretty things like colors and children’s laughter and the feel of wind in the Dodge with all the windows down on Interstate 81.  At some point I realized that the Dodge had been in the basket from the beginning, and in a way so had those children. Along with everything else I love.  It took me years to figure out that the basket held what I would need later on.  They would be there when I needed them.   I had known since a child that God had made the basket especially for me and sent it to me along with the promise that it would be okay.   I thought that meant that I would learn to sacrifice, to do with less, but that God would pay me back somehow.  Tenfold.

Gradually, and I’m not sure when, I began to understand that the basket itself is a treasure: I enjoy it.   It makes me giggle.   It helps me cry.   It makes me slow.   It requires that I think.   It shows me the success and failures of human love.

So, Donna, when I read about your gratitude for last year, I read in part that you are grateful for what seemed like a terrible thing happening to your child. I know that Scripture teaches us to seek in His name and we will receive.   Still, I am convinced that we must first be at a point of Need in order to see what he has already prepared for us.  What’s already in the basket and that we can have as soon as we learn how to name it.   And I don’t mean by this rambling that Amy’s seizures were in any way a means of teaching her or her family a lesson.   Just the opposite!   They were a gift, a cloverleaf off a crowded interstate to Another Place.   Hard as they were, she found good in them.   You found good in them.   I found good in them – – through you.  Am I making any sense at all?”

Aunt Barbara, you make perfect sense to me.