My friend Debbie called last week. She said a hospice worker had stopped in to see her, she had decided to give up treatments for the cancer creeping from her breast to her arm and now her lungs. I went to her the next day, arriving just in time to answer a rap on her door. A friendly man lugged an oxygen machine into the tiny room and Debbie gave me permission to move her beloved guitar to make space for the thing. When he left, I brushed her soft, short hair and gently wrapped the tube around her ears. Debbie reached to fix the openings under her nose. “I feel like it’s helping already,” she said. I returned to my spot on the couch, the machine now humming between us. Our eyes settled on each other’s once again.
“I’ve been thinking about Bethany,” she said. “I wonder if she’ll be waiting to meet me.” Bethany died just before birth over twenty years ago. “I wonder,” Debbie continued with a light curiosity, “I wonder if she’ll be young, certainly not a baby but…how old are people in heaven? I wonder.” I said I didn’t know, but I was sure that Bethany will be there waiting for her mother.
Debbie is a loving mom to six children, grandmother to two and one on the way. We haven’t spoken of that looming grief, of leaving her beloved children, it’s too great for words. But in the moment she parts from those she has nurtured, there will be a precious joining with the one she never had the chance to, a reunion that triumphs death and heartbreak. Tears on my cheeks, I smiled at the sweet sadness. “Look what God has done, Debbie. In your worst grief, He has for you a most extraordinary gift.” “Yes,” she closed her eyes, sleepy and overwhelmed, “I will finally be with Bethany.”
From the fullness of His grace we have all received one blessing after another. John 1:16
Meeting God at the Park 