This was first published in a Dear Abby column years ago.
MOM’S STRENGTH, FORGIVENESS STILL INSPIRE DECADES LATER

DEAR ABBY: My dear, late father read the old Baltimore News Post newspaper from cover to cover. He would put me on his lap and read the funnies or something special to keep me current and interested in the news. I have read newspapers ever since — and always your column.

The letter from the woman whose little sister was killed when a young neighbor backed her car out of the driveway brought back many memories.

I believe I knew the family. We were in our early 30s then, with two children of our own. We met the family at church functions. They carried that beautiful child on their shoulders as a trophy — and beautiful she was.

The parents owned a religious bookstore. When news of the tragic accident spread, everyone who knew them showed up at the church service and funeral. I remember the eulogies. That outpouring of love for this precious family was overwhelming.

After the service, there was a profound silence. Then a strong, beautiful singing voice began to fill the church. The song was, “Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so.” I looked around and realized the voice was coming from the child’s mother! People around me wanted to join in, but they couldn’t choke back the tears.

I watched in amazement as this mother helped her husband to stand as their children followed. She led the entire church in the procession, never losing her strength or composure. Her voice soared above every other in that huge gathering.

She taught us that God loves us so much he grants supernatural strength when we need it most. Please tell this young woman that her family’s example of strength and forgiveness touched my life and many others for more than 24 years.

– LINDA BRESSLER, TAMPA, FLA.

DEAR LINDA: And I’m sure your letter will touch the hearts of others, as it touched mine.

There is a loneliness about this place … this place of my choosing. Surrounded by the things of life, I have suddenly come face to face with the solitariness of life. One person, one life, one place, one God, one moment in time-solitary, alone, yet not alone.

God has chosen his way of filling this place and this space in my life with the “ordinariness” of life. How long has it been since I lost the sense of the wondrous, magnificent works of God? How long has it been since I have been excited about what God is doing before ray very eyes? How long has it been since God became ordinary?

How strange that the sun should become ordinary to me, that clouds, and rain, and snow, and sunshine have become common, pedestrian fare.

How strange that God should choose to speak through naked branches having neither bud nor bloom, that God should choose to utter sounds through rivers and streams frozen in place, in icicles glittering
promises of still more winter, still more discontent.

Or that God should choose to brave speaking through the commonplace roads of my existence and has made them icy, slippery, impassable, treacherous … sending me off in unknown directions, sliding, sometimes falling, meeting new hurt-in peculiar places. How strange of God to speak through the ordinariness of life. How strange.

I do not know  why I am here. I do not know what I am to do here. More to the point, I do not know how I got to this place, which is so far from where I started out, so far from the destination to which I was determined to go. I only know that I must follow that Voice, the Voice that speaks in tones that I am familiar with, tones that I have so often failed to listen to and failed often to understand or obey.

Could it be that I am in this lonely place, this solitary space, to wait again for the Empowering Presence?… to wait again for the Call that I alone am burdened to hear? … to wait again for that purifying, energizing, frightening fire that burns within?

I need to feel it again. I need to know that God’s fire is my fire. I desperately need to know that my loneliness is not permanent and that my solitariness is filled with the awesome purposefulness of God.

This moment, this hour, this time is not mine, it belongs to God. I am now wholly alone, wholly vulnerable, wholly available. Come, Holy Spirit, with wind and fire. Let your breath blow anew in my life. Penetrate my soul and my personality with the power of your touch. Broken, humbled, frightened, unsure of today and tomorrow … only sure that you are there. Come, Holy Spirit, use me now! Let the fire burn!