Tonight was Mom's visitation. I expected a big crowd, but was floored by the actual turnout. When we counted names at the end of the night, we were at almost 400 people who signed the guest book. The line stretched out the door of the funeral and down the sidewalk, from what I'm told. For a small town country girl, I'd say she made a huge impact. It was nice to see some of the old faces and to even put faces to some of the other names that she talked about frequently.
Saturday night after we got home from the hospital, I was going through the mail and there was an envelope from Chase Bank. Not thinking much about it, I handed it to Sherry thinking that it was a statement that needed to be filed away with the paperwork. I was a little surprised when she said that it was a check and started to hand it back to me. You see, just a couple of weeks earlier we had needed to buy a new TV (well, "needed" probably isn't the right word, but you know how guys are with TVs), so Bryan got a great deal on a new TV. We figured that we would pull some money out of savings and pay for it. Hold that thought....I'll tie this all together in a minute.
So on Saturday afternoon as we were making the final decisions about what to do about Mom's deteriorating condition, I asked Dad about the new gazebo. You see, for the longest time, Mom had wanted a screened in gazebo in the backyard. And for whatever reason, it just hadn't happened. Well, just a few weeks ago Dad had finally gotten everything arranged and had the gazebo put in for Mom. As it turns out, she got to sit in it just once before she back in the hospital for the last time. Thinking about that, I just got angry. And some of my thoughts on Saturday afternoon were not pleasant ones towards God. I couldn't reconcile why He would do that; how could a generous and loving God allow that to happen? And I kind of expressed that to Dad. He asked me if I needed to speak to a pastor or if he wanted me to call someone to talk to and I declined; I needed to process through it on my own.
So now back to the check that came in the mail and it was from the re-finance that we had done of our mortgage earlier in the summer and the check was for (almost to the penny) the amount that we had to come up with for the new TV. As with the story from the other day about the song selection on Sunday morning, holding that check in my hand was just a reminder on that very, very tough day that even though we don't see the whole picture and we can never understand why everything in our lives happens, there is a reason for it. The pieces may not all fit as we hope or expect them to, but every piece is laid out and constructed perfectly by THE Maker of it all.
