Peace from the Lord.

      “Lord give me peace ... wonderful peace  ... from the Lord, peace for the journey ... peace in the wilderness, Lord take me over, Lord give me peace.”  Over and over this stilted cadence verbally came  forth in hopeful language from the crooked mouth of an aged and bent white haired woman in an unmoving wheel chair. Her chair with wheels seemed made to travel but on the other hand it seemed destined to move very short distances around in this Alzheimer unit.  Her endless sequence about peace was never the same, yet it was ever earnest in its spoken longing coming from this dear child of the Lord.  This is a child of the Lord who desires to leave her disease bound desert like condition and cross over into the fruited land of eternal promise.  

     She could not see nor could she hear but she could see the place she longed to go and she could hear her Savior talking.  She could not go to this place by way of a man-made wheel chair pushed by an aide’s assistance nor could she loose the ties that held her in this endless waiting day after day.  This was a long waiting to cross over to that place of perpetual, eternal peace.  The release she desires will come on the wings of peace, a peace that is deep inside of her.  A peace she speaks of as she lives in this suffering place.  It is a peace that holds even in the silence of the Lord she knows when He does not grant her wishes to journey to His bosom.   Peace, she knows.  The Lord she knows.  Not peace as in the absence of suffering, but peace in suffering.  Not a Lord who takes away suffering but a Lord who suffers with her.  This is what she knows.  Peace from her Lord in spite of age limiting pain and frustration.  This she knows.   

     She now knows no others … not her family, not her friends, not the people who are paid to care when all that is a life and living in normalcy is forgotten.  Forgotten is now her real disease, forgotten are the voices, forgotten are the conversations and forgotten is the person who cannot answer the questions addressed to her.  Maybe it is all the others like me, those in this room, who try to answer about suffering who do not know.  Still we insist on trying.  We try to answer all the questions about her because she cannot speak.  We think someone needs to answer all the questions about why this tragedy of non-living happened to someone that was dearly loved and now only suffers.  Maybe no one has to answer.  Maybe it is the rest of us that do not realize there can be peace in a silent and brutal place.  Maybe we have forgotten the Lord who suffers because we consider and value to know only the God who provides, too much.

            Maybe it is enough to remember what this forgotten woman who cannot move or answer, is truly speaking of.  For what the woman remembers, is what she has; and no dreadful disease even one that abducts hope itself, can possibly take that away.  Peace comes from the Lord who both suffers and provides.  It is peace in the wilderness, peace for the journey and finally peace that will take us over into peace everlasting.  Lord, give us all, that peace. srm