Amy Inspired - Bethany Pierce [93]
I’ve been wondering lately what would happen if I really prayed. All the promises in Scripture seem to imply we are entitled to the same miracles Christ performed.
Did I ever tell you that when I was a little girl I tried to walk on water? Dad had rented a paddleboat for our family vacation. I don’t know what came over me, but out there in the very middle of the lake, I just stepped off the back of that paddleboat and slipped right under the water. It was, and remains, the greatest spiritual failure of my life.
So my question: was I being foolish or was my faith smaller than even a mustard seed?
Amy
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From: iheartofu@writersnet.com
To: gallagham@copenhagen.edu
Sent: Thursday 4.26.07 7:02 PM
Subject: Re: (none)
who’s to judge?
what i want to know is why miracles are things you always hear about but never see. it’s always a story someone heard from a neighbor who saw it happen to a cousin. as a believer, i am always catching the aftereffect of the miracles, the last ripple to roll out from the place God comes down and touches the earth. why can’t i see an angel? water to wine? your faith was big enough: why didn’t you walk on water?
the year mom was diagnosed with cancer i prayed every day that God would heal her—miraculously heal her. what kills me is that I really believed it could happen. the expectation only increased daily because a part of me feared that if I didn’t expect Him to help her, He will have no choice but to fail me … that’s so messed up it almost sounds like something you’d do.
it’s exhausting to keep the hope engine running. i’m like a kid pinching her eyelids open to stay awake for the end of the show: certain that if i let my hope fall even for a second, i’ve failed mom, God, myself.
don’t tell anyone this. esp. the Baptists. they will just tell me to read Psalms.
love
Zoë
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From: iheartofu@writersnet.com
To: gallagham@copenhagen.edu
Sent: Thursday 4.26.07 2:07 AM
Subject: news
back in the hospital. wanted to call but is late. mom in bad way: high-grade small bowel obstruction. she’s up for early morning surgery. pray it goes all right.
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From: gallagham@copenhagen.edu
To: iheartofu@writersnet.com
Sent: Monday 4.30.07 11:56 PM
Subject: Re: news
Zoë,
I’ve been trying to call. I know maybe you don’t want to talk. I just wanted to write, to say I’m sorry.
Waiting to hear from you.
Love
Amy
20
Brian once told me that when a person has cancer, they always have cancer. However aggressive the treatment, however meticulously a surgeon disentangles the tumors one by one, a single stray cell flicked from the scalpel is all the root a metastasis needs. Some patients are fortunate; for whatever reason the remaining cancer cells never grow and the body carries them along unwittingly. Others aren’t so lucky.
It was Brian’s first year of med school and he was always relaying facts he found fascinating. But what fascinated him typically horrified me. Cancer, for example.
Fay’s surgery went well, but the physician suspected a perforation in her bowel. A hole in her intestines would be inoperable. The cancer had grown throughout her lower digestive tract and further surgery would do more harm than good.
They fed her a mixture of charcoal and then they waited. When the black matter appeared in the bag affixed to the wound in her abdomen, the hospital cleric gave Jerry prayer and a handful of brochures for hospice.
I called Zoë morning and night, but she never picked up. I was grateful for my busyness, how it distracted me from imagining her grief. It was the end of the semester and tension filled the air. No amount of hard work leaves a teacher or a student prepared for May. My freshmen balked against writing their last essay. The creative writers scrambled to complete revisions for the final portfolio I’d assigned the very first day of workshop.
I rushed to finish overdue recommendation