It’s time for Small Success Thursday over at CatholicMom.com.
- This was a powerful experience for me but a weird one, so if you’re weird enough to read my blog, you might get something out of reading the following. My brother-in-law lost his life to lung cancer last Tuesday, the Feast of St. Jude. This is one of those cases where, since my husband is a Tiber-crosser, his family isn’t Catholic, so the comfort of the sacraments wasn’t something on their minds. It was on mine, though. Family is tricky, especially in-laws, especially when they live far away and we’re not all that close to begin with. As my BIL was suffering his own lung problems, coincidentally I was in the depth of my annual viral-triggered asthma cold. For those of you unfamiliar, this means sleepless, wheeze-filled nights and wheeze-filled, cough-filled days. So, given the constraints of earthly relationships and distance, I told God I’d take the wheezing and coughing and offer it up to help my BIL in his suffering. I didn’t do a formal novena, but I asked St.Jude to plead God’s mercy for my BIL as well, and I asked that if BIL passed on St. Jude’s feast, it would be a sign of that mercy. So that happened. That’s not all. The service for BIL was on the evening of All Saints. That night, I was fighting the wheezing and coughing so I could get to sleep. In that twilight between too tired to be fully awake and too wheezy to actually be asleep, I had a sort of waking dream (not a vision or hallucination, mind-you). In it, BIL sat on the side of the bed and palpably touched me on my left bicep. Within moments my wheezing stopped and I fell asleep. Now, I’m no theologian, nor can I say with any certainty what God judges for either of us. Still, the possibility that my offerings for my BIL meant something to him and he knows that I cared enough to offer him my suffering… as Small Successes go, it’s not like it’s a success I can claim, but it is a success for our relationships with each other in Christ. We may be bound by the sacraments, but I’m grateful that God is not.
- The laundry is being done and there were a few days in the past two weeks where we didn’t spend a red cent on takeout of any kind.
- Driving up and down the state from the height of fall color into its decline inspired a poem. I don’t do poems often, but I do like them.
Imagine the Cry
Imagine the cry you would hear
If I took to the trunk of a maple
An axe or a saw
As its leaves
Changed
Shades.
“Look how it suffers!
It soon will be naked,
Undignified,
Worthless,
And we’ll have a mess on the ground.”
Imagine the cry,
“No! It still has seasons
beyond this death!”
“But I cannot see them.”
So I wield the axe.
This is my tree.
This is my right.
The tree suffers no more.
Erin McCole Cupp 