When God Speaks to Us

 In my column Wednesday, I mentioned that my mother-in-law was in the hospital terminally ill, and that I was getting curious cues for columns from the signs in the hospital where my wife and I were spending our days with her.

My wife's mother passed away that night at 89 after her lengthy illness.  Certainly her passing was a blessing given her failing health and incapacity -- she required 24/7 care by her daughter for the last year and a half, to maintain a reasonable quality of life for her as detailed in this piece. But it was a further blessing given the messages surrounding her passing, that we received over the next day.

Not from friends and family, of course.

The first came about an hour after the midnight call from the hospital that she had indeed left, a half-day after her medications had been discontinued in favor of a palliative, pain-reduction regimen.  My wife finally got off to sleep, only to be visited in dreams by the mother she had cared so diligently for, for so long.

The encounter was in her mother's closet, where my wife found her putting clothes in a hamper.  "You don't have to do that", she told her mother.  "Why", her mother asked, "because I'm gone?"  "Yes", she was told ... whereupon the wrinkles disappeared from her face and she returned to the young woman she had been in the 1940s.  "Look, Mom, you can walk now", my wife said, and her mother began to walk unaided, and without the walker she had moved with for years.  She then turned back to my wife, paused and said "I am so happy!"

My Best Girl awoke from that dream knowing that her departed mother, now reunited with her late husband, her parents, her son and other family lost these many years, had just given her permission to return to her own life.  Can you read that and hold it together?

Early in the morning we decided to head to the hospital where she had died, to make the appropriate arrangements.  Inova Fairfax Hospital is, let's say, "sprawling", which means that the campus makes some universities look small.  We had no idea where to go, or even what office to seek, and just headed to the elevator, one of dozens in that campus, and went to the ground level, where we saw "Administrative Offices."

The receptionist there did not know where to send us, but gave us a phone number for "Decedent Affairs" to call, an office "somewhere in the basement and not near here."  And possibly not the right office anyway.  We stepped back out into the lobby and dialed.

I had not finished dialing when from one direction came straight over to us the director of hospice care, with whom we had been meeting the previous two days.  Knowing that she would know exactly what to tell us, and celebrating our serendipity, I hung up the phone -- when from the other direction came walking up to us the head of geriatric medicine there, who had been dealing with my mother-in-law's case for two years.  That would be the other person on earth who knew us, and knew where to take us.  Neither knew we were coming in that day.

In case you're wondering, the odds of either of them running into us on that campus, while we were figuring out what to do next, were fairly remote.  Both of them?

That would be called "divine intervention."  That's certainly what we called it.

I know that in these times people are often looking for signs, or they respond to situations believing what they want to believe.  Others read astrology sections of their papers, even though they never tell you of anything bad happening.

I am more than happy to have taken what has occurred in the last day as the comforting signs from our Heavenly Father that He is indeed here to take the burdens from us if we will accept His great word and His sacrifice for us.  It is not hard to explain, and not hard to understand.

It's actually simple.  I know that my Redeemer liveth.

Copyright 2015 by Robert Sutton
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