Season of Blessing Page 27

  For the first time in days, Sylvia laughed out loud.

  “I have to go back there,” she said. “I can’t even fathom the thought that I’m never going to see them again.”

  “Me, too,” Annie whispered. “As a matter of fact…”

  Sylvia looked up at her. “As a matter of fact, what?”

  Annie sprang to her feet. “As a matter of fact…I’ve told Josh so much about León and the children and the clinic. And he’s studying to be a doctor, you know. And then we found out that some of the doctors at our church were getting up a medical missions trip to work at Dr. Harry’s clinic, and he decided he wanted to go with them.”

  Sylvia brought her hands to her face. “Are you serious?”

  “Yes. And I’m going, too.” She struck a pose, then screamed. “Can you believe it? I’m going back! We’re going during Christmas break this year!”

  Sylvia got up slowly, her face glowing with delight. “Oh, Annie. That’s wonderful. You can help so much, since you know where everything is. You can take presents to the children from me, and bring back news.”

  “Oh, yeah. I’m going for the kids. I mean, it’ll be fun going with Josh and everything, but he’ll be busy at the clinic. I just want to spend the whole time at the orphanage, and hug those precious children, and get to know the new ones.”

  “New ones,” Sylvia said. “I guess there are new ones. A whole bunch of them who don’t know anything about me.”

  Annie’s smile faded, and her eyes rounded. “I’ll tell them about you. And that you’ll be coming back soon.”

  Sylvia hugged her. “Now don’t you two fall head over heels in love and go off and get married in Nicaragua. Your mother would never forgive me.”

  Annie laughed. “Yeah, that’ll be the day. Talk about giving my mom a heart attack. I’d never do that to her.”

  “Don’t do it to me either,” Sylvia said. “I want to be at your wedding.”

  “Whenever it is, and whoever it’s with, you’ll be there, Miss Sylvia. I wouldn’t have it without you.”

  But that night, as she lay in bed, trying hard to sleep through her pain, Sylvia had the shivering, dreadful feeling that she wouldn’t make it to Annie’s wedding day.

  She might not even make it to Christmas.

  CHAPTER

  Sixty-Nine

  When Miva come back?” Bo’s question came as he sat in the circle in their classroom, each of the children clutching the wordless book they kept in their cubbies. Tory looked around, wondering how much to tell them about Sylvia’s decline. With each passing day, Sylvia grew more ill, but Tory could hardly speak of it without her throat tightening.

  “Miss Sylvia’s not feeling well. We’ve got to keep praying for her. And she would like it if we kept reading the book she gave us.”

  Carefully, Tory went through the wordless book, letting the students call out what each page meant, just as Sylvia had taught them. When she’d finished, she sent the children back to their desks. But Bo hung back, looking at her through the thick lenses in his glasses. She hoped he wasn’t going to ask her about Sylvia again.

  “What is it, Bo?”

  “I wanna new hawt.”

  Tory’s eyes rounded, and she bent toward him. “What did you say?”

  “I want Deezus give me new hawt.” He turned to the white page and pointed to it.

  Tory got down on her knees in front of the child, and looked him in the eye. “You want a new heart? Why, Bo?”

  He shoved his glasses up on his nose. “My hawt ditty.”

  Tears filled her eyes, and she touched his shoulder. “You’re heart’s dirty?”

  He nodded. “Deezus give me new hawt.”

  Tory looked up and her eyes met Linda’s. She saw the teacher grab the camcorder, cut it on. Yes, she thought. This is one of those moments we’ll want to remember. She cleared her throat. “You can have a new heart, Bo. All you have to do is ask Jesus. Tell him to take your dirty heart out and give you a clean, new heart. And he will.”

  Bo grinned, and his eyes grew wider. “And he wive in me?” He tapped his heart. “In here?”

  “That’s right. He’ll live with you in there. Right inside of you. Every day of your life.”

  “Den I go heben,” he said.

  “That’s right. And then you’ll go to heaven.”

  Tory struggled to keep herself from crumbling right in front of the child. What would Sylvia do now? she wondered. She would pray. Yes, she would pray with little Bo.

  Her voice came out on a whisper. “Let’s pray right now, Bo, and we’ll ask Jesus to take out your dirty heart and give you a clean one.”

  The little boy knelt in front of her just as she had done, and folded his hands.

  “Deezus,” he whispered, and he began to pray his own Down’s Syndrome version of the sinner’s prayer.

  When they came out of the prayer, Tory’s face was wet, and she desperately needed a Kleenex. Bo went to tell his friends about his new heart, and Tory got to her feet. She looked at Linda again. Still holding the camcorder, the teacher hugged Tory. “Do you realize what you just did?”

  Tory laughed through her tears. “Do you realize what Bo just did? And all this time I thought these children weren’t capable of making a decision for Christ.”

  “In Bo’s case, you were wrong,” Linda said. “I made this video so we could show it to his parents. I thought it would mean the world to them.”

  “Can we make a copy?” she asked. “I’d really like to show it to Sylvia. It’s only right that she should see the fruit of her labors.”

  “You bet,” Linda said. “I’ll have you a copy made by the time you leave the school this morning.”

  CHAPTER

  Seventy

  That night, Cathy, Tory, and Brenda got together to visit Sylvia. Pain twisted Sylvia’s face, but she made a valiant effort to smile around it. When they showed her the video of Bo praying, she started to weep.

  The other three passed a box of tissue around.

  “You know something, Sylvia?” Tory got the video out of the VCR. “Other than Spencer and Brittany, Bo’s the first person I’ve ever led to Christ, and you did most of the work.”

  Sylvia waved a hand, as if that was ridiculous. “Oh, I didn’t. All I did was read him a book. God did all the work.”

  “But isn’t it amazing,” Tory said, “to think that a little boy like that with such a simple mind could grasp something so profound?”

  Sylvia smiled. “God showed you this, Tory, so that you’d know that he’ll be able to do the same thing with Hannah when she’s older. This was God’s way of telling you to instruct Hannah in the ways of salvation, even though she’ll always be so childlike. Let’s watch it again.”

  Tory put the video back in and rewound it. While they waited, Cathy took Sylvia’s cold hand. “Sylvia, you’re my hero.”

  Sylvia frowned at her. “Why on earth?”

  “Because even when you’ve been fighting the hardest battle of your life, you were out there teaching children about Christ.”

  Brenda concurred. “You were, Sylvia. Most of us would have been licking our wounds, but your mind has always been on everyone else.”

  Sylvia smiled. “If you only knew. I’ve thought about myself. Trust me.”

  They watched the video again, sniffling and wiping their eyes. Finally, when it was over, Sylvia said, “Let’s pray. Come here, all of you. Let’s get in a circle and pray like we used to on Brenda’s front porch.” The women came around her and held her hands.

  “God showed Tory a miracle today,” she whispered. “But I’m asking for one more.” She knew they all expected her to ask for healing, but she had something else on her mind. “There’s one more person that I want to see saved before I die.”

  “Who’s that?” Cathy asked.

  Sylvia looked at Brenda. “I want to see David come to know the Lord.”

  CHAPTER

  Seventy-One

  The cough that S
ylvia developed in September was another clue that the chemotherapy wasn’t working to stop the cancer. When the time came for her next round of scans, her fears were confirmed. The cancer had spread to her lungs.

  The doctor changed the chemo once again.

  Sylvia hardly noticed when Harry quit his job at the hospital. Suddenly he was with her every moment of every day, by her side when she retched into the toilet, helping her walk through the house when she was too weak to do so on her own. Every ounce of Sylvia’s energy went into her survival. There was none left for conversation or thoughts of despair or worry of any kind. She just concentrated on getting through one moment at a time.

  Soon her breathing got shallow and raspy, her fever spiked, and she lay for hours without the energy to open her eyes. She had a vague awareness of Harry bustling around her, putting cold compresses on her head and neck and arms and chest…

  Harry’s frantic voice into the phone…neighbors touching her and talking to her…

  Limp as the doll that Sarah used to carry around as a child, she felt groping hands, stethoscopes, an IV going into her arm.

  Then they rolled her into an ambulance. Harry held her hand and prayed over her for the long, jostling ride.

  Sometime later, Harry sat helplessly in her hospital room, listening to her breathe beneath the oxygen mask. Urgently, he searched his Bible for some word from God, some sign that he was going to pull her out of this and heal her. It was God’s way, he told himself frantically. Didn’t he like making things look grim, so that it was clear a miracle had been done? Wasn’t that what he’d done when Jonathan and his armor bearer had over-taken the Philistine army? God had thrust confusion into the Philistines’ hearts, and they had killed each other. And when God was raising an army with Gideon as the leader, hadn’t he sent everyone but three hundred men home, just to show the world that they hadn’t done the work, but God had?

  If cancer was their enemy—and it most definitely was—then maybe God was letting it look as grim as it could, so that he could do his miracle.

  So Harry searched the Psalms for some word from God that he would deliver her, some sign that he would not make her suffer any longer, some indication that she would be restored.

  But he found none.

  When the doctor came by the room, Harry jumped to his feet and confronted him. “She’s dying, isn’t she?”

  The expression in Dr. Thibodeaux’s eyes gave him no hope. “She’s very sick.”

  Harry wanted to put his fist through the man’s face, grab him by the collar and tell him to get out of here and find a cure. He tried to keep his voice steady. “You’ve got to do everything you can to keep her alive. If you’ve heard of any kind of treatment that might work, any kind of clinical trials, I want to know about them. Alternative treatments. Experimental drugs. Anything.”

  “I’ve been looking, Harry, just as you have. But she’s very, very ill, and this is an aggressive cancer that we haven’t been able to stop. It’s growing and spreading too fast.”

  Harry’s lips compressed tightly across his teeth. “She can’t die. Do you understand me? My wife cannot die. Not yet.” But even as he said the words, he knew that the matter was out of the doctor’s control. He might as well be waving his fist at God.

  “We’ll do everything we can for her, Harry. You have my word.”

  There was nothing more that Harry could demand of him. It was too late for medicine and science to work in Sylvia’s body. It was going to take a true miracle. Only God could heal her now.

  But for the first time, Harry had to face the fact that God might choose not to.

  CHAPTER

  Seventy-Two

  From the depths of fevered unconsciousness, Sylvia felt as if she floated at the bottom of a warm ocean. There was no pain there, no drugs, no time ticking away…

  A bright light shone through the opaque depths, and she swam toward it, but as hard as she swam, she got no closer to the light. It wasn’t time.

  Still, that light shone like an escape hatch through which she would soon pass…

  And for the first time, there was no dread. Beyond that light her Father watched and waited…

  Home beckoned…

  She was not forsaken, but anticipated.

  She was not abandoned, but summoned.

  Soon, a voice seemed to say from that light, but not yet. There’s more for you to do.

  So she stopped swimming and floated there, limp and docile, as she began to rise to the top.

  When they got the fever down and gave Sylvia a transfusion to get her blood count back up, she began to return to full consciousness. “How in the world did I wind up here?” she asked Harry.

  Harry got onto her hospital bed and lay beside her, stroking her face. He’d spent the last two nights sleeping on the couch in her room, and fatigue had crept over him like a life-eating fungus. “An ambulance brought you.” His eyes misted over. “I thought I’d lost you.”

  “That bad, huh?”

  “Yeah, that bad.”

  She stared at him for a long moment. “Harry, I’m going to die.”

  The statement surprised him, and he closed his eyes and shook his head. “Don’t say that,” he whispered. “Please don’t say that.”

  She touched his face, stroked her fingers across the stubble. “I have to, Harry. You know it’s true.”

  He squeezed his eyes shut and pressed his lips together.

  “Honey, it’s okay,” she whispered. “Don’t cry.”

  This was all wrong, he told himself. He was supposed to be telling her not to cry. She was the one who hurt…

  He steeled himself and forced his eyes open. “I’m supposed to be telling you that.”

  “But why? You’re the one who’ll be left when I go. The greater pain in this is yours. I’ll just be going home.” A tear rolled across her nose, and he wiped it away.

  “Remember the night after we met with the surgeon, and we talked about the elders laying hands on me? Remember how we said that whatever happened, we would know that God had heard our prayers, and had chosen to answer according to his will?”

  Had he really said that? Had he meant it? Had he even known what he was talking about? It had been easy then, at the beginning of this, when she wasn’t so ill and there was so much hope. But now…“Why is this his will?” he whispered. “It seems so hard.”

  She kissed his wet cheek. “It’s not hard, Harry. Remember how you told me that, whatever happens, we know that God loves me even more than you do?”

  He nodded.

  “He does, you know. He’s there making a place for me…waiting for me…He loves me, and he loves you. And I’ll bet he’s weeping with us. Hating that our hearts are broken. Hating that we can’t see the big picture that he can see. But he loves us, Harry, and we can’t doubt that.”

  “So what do we do?” His voice was rising in pitch…he wasn’t going to be able to hold strong for her. He felt like a brokenhearted child who’d just learned the meaning of death. “How do we handle this?”

  “Medically, we keep fighting. Spiritually, we start accepting.”

  Harry let out a shaky breath. “I thought I could do that. But now I wonder how that’s even possible.”

  Sylvia’s eyes twinkled as her dry lips stretched into a smile. “When I take the chemo, I sing praises. It gets me through the fear and the sick feelings and the dread. It keeps me focused. So that’s what I think we should do, Harry. I think we should sing.”

  No, not that. He didn’t have a song in his heart. It was too heavy to work up a tune…“I can’t, Sylvia. I can’t sing right now.”

  “Yes, you can,” she whispered. “Come on…sing with me.”

  He sighed. “I’m tired, Sylvia.”

  She stroked his thinning gray hair. “I know you are. You can rest in a minute. After you’ve sung one chorus with me.”

  He knew she wouldn’t relent, so reluctantly he said, “All right. Pick a song.”

  He had hoped
she’d, at least, pick a slow one…one that reflected the sorrow in his heart. But she didn’t. Instead, she chose the upbeat “Shout to the Lord,” and started to sing softly, coughing intermittently as they went. He joined in weakly, trying to mean it, trying to make his mind focus on the Creator of the universe who could have healed Sylvia but hadn’t.

  By the end of the song, her eyes smiled with a serenity that he wished he had. But he feared he’d never know the feeling of peace again.

  David and Brenda came to the hospital as soon as they heard that Sylvia had emerged from the fog of fever.

  Brenda held David’s hand as they made their way down the hall to her room. She glanced at his face, and saw in his misty eyes that he, too, was struck with the memory of their child lying so close to death in this very building.

  They reached Sylvia’s door. “Let me peek in and see if it’s a good time,” she whispered, and David stood back, waiting. “I don’t want to disturb her if she’s sleeping.”

  She cracked the door open and saw that the drapes were open. Sunshine streamed into the room, and she saw Harry sitting on the couch and looking toward the bed.

  Instead of the sick silence of machines, she heard a song. Sylvia sang quietly…in her thin, raspy, breathless voice. “When Christ’s sweet face I see…the suffering shall flee…”

  Brenda caught her breath and stepped back. She put her hand over her heart and turned back to David. “She’s singing!” she whispered.

  David took a step toward the door, and listened.

  “My trials will be worthwhile…when His face I see.”

  Brenda stepped inside, and Sylvia began to laugh at the sight of her.

  David stood outside the door, unable to follow just yet. He stepped to the side and leaned against the wall, trying to contain himself.