HOW YOU LIVING?

MALACHI WENT TO SEE MY MOM before he went to prom last weekend.

She was overjoyed, and I was truly pleased with him, because he had a real desire to do it.  Her appearance shocks him every time he sees her. 

Her appearance in pictures is what I find so shocking.  

It has been a long road.  I have raised my sons as a single parent, with no child support of any kind.  I abandoned bitterness and rage a couple years ago (shoulda done it sooo much sooner) and just put my head down and committed to being available for my two youngest sons.

That's how I've been living, and it has borne the fruit in the suit you see there.

Now, when my mom became ill, my best friend from high school called to tell me.  She thought I would be hardhearted and stiffnecked, but I chose otherwise.  The MRI which showed the herniated disc that was about to paralyze her completely, I took her.  It was supposed to last 45 minutes, but 20 minutes in, it was over.  "Either she's perfectly healthy, or the tech found something serious."  Four days later, she was undergoing cervical fusion.  They could not find any vein to draw blood.  Dr. Kantor, the anesthesiologist threw up her hands.  

"I vill naht geev upp!" she cried, and proceeded to perform a technique they don't do here.  The entire surgical team stayed beyond their shift.  They rearranged the OR schedule.  Every team in the hospital had tried to draw my mom's blood, and they threw protocol to the winds and saved her life.  

She'd (purposely) eaten before the procedure and thrown everything into chaos.  

Mom turned accusing eyes to me.  "You didn't tell me."  

"Yes she did," said her husband.

"You didn't come in my room and stop me," she rejoined, as if she had not heard.

"Okay mom. I'm not sure I knew you were eating a croissant behind your closed bedroom door."

"Well, you should have known, and came in there and stopped me."

That is how she is living.  Been blaming me since the day I was born, like I came to the world on purpose to prove she was sleeping with that woman's husband.

I had to walk away from that toxicity.  But now she has no one except me, her husband with his untreated diabetic issues, and my children.  The one who is becoming rich off the income of my eldest son pops in now and then, to ask where I've been, mostly.

I am living in a season of penitence.  I'm not bitter, I'm better.  If it were not for faith, I'd have done something besides wait on the LORD, yew betcha.  Apostle John Eckhardt gave a word on recompense, which is justice and vindication after times of injustice and unfairness patiently endured, that I am embracing today.

  

I had a dream in which I met a giant farm combine in the middle of the road.  I had to go around it.  The farmer tipped his battered straw hat as I maneuvered around him.  It could have been Eckhardt, 'cause he really looks like a white guy.  I visited old men and families in whitewashed houses.  There were times of fog and storm.  Just before I woke, the sun came out.  I looked over and away, and there was that green and yellow Deere harvester, reaping.  The tiny figure in the cab threw up his plaid-shirted arm in salute to me.  My harvest.  It's coming.

That is how I'm living.

Thanks for taking time to read this blog.