Pandemic Parables: Epilogue

Pandemic Parables: Epilogue 

Sunday August 30th 2020

Let me tell you a story about the flowers I received before leaving the hospital. The glorious, vibrant bouquet that I mentioned in my last parable, Finished!

As many of you who have been reading my Pandemic Parables know, I just finished a year’s intense course as a Resident Chaplain at my local hospital in Frederick, Maryland. What only a few close friends know is that it was an excruciatingly difficult time, not just because of the pandemic, but because of other circumstances that would have made even a normal, always challenging, residency hard to endure. 

On my penultimate day at the hospital, right after I had finished the last group seminar, and was so effectively finished except for packing up and saying goodbyes, I found the flowers on my desk. There was a note from our staff chaplain saying that the security guard at the front entrance had phoned to say they were there waiting for me. The chaplain picked them up because I was in class. By the time I was out, the wonderful security guard, who has become my friend, had left for the day. 

On Friday, my last day, there she was at the front desk as I came in to the hospital at the crack of dawn. 

“You wonderful, wonderful, woman!” I said, wishing I could hug her.

“It wasn’t me - it was a God thing, she said. And then went on to tell me the story. 

The flowers had come in late the previous evening. The evening shift had, apparently, not looked up the patient, and my friend, the guard, discovered that they had been discharged already. 

“I spent all morning trying to track the patient down,” she said. “But I couldn’t find them. So I phoned the florist, which was in Virginia, about an hour away. They said they had already sent a replacement bouquet to the patient, whose family were good customers, and to give those flowers to anyone I chose. You had commented on how beautiful they were when you passed by in the morning, and I knew without a shadow of a doubt that they were yours!”

I was beyond thrilled! I knew they were a present from the Almighty, a congratulations on finishing the course. And my generous friend knew that also. 

I was aglow with gratitude!

It reminded me of another time when I finished an incredibly difficult year, and the Lord gave me presents straight from His hand. 

It was June 2004, sixteen years ago. I had driven home from Canada after working for a year at retreat center in Orangeville, Ontario. The place was hour outside Toronto set in fifty acres of bucolic beauty that had been soaked in prayer for decades. Like with the hospital, I had done an intense course at the center before working there. The two month residential course focused on training people who wanted to help heal the broken hearted. But we are all broken hearted in one way or another and so I did the course to bring about my own healing, before working as their Director of Creativity on a one year visa. 

I arrived home, that June in the early hours of the morning, wondering if I would be uprooted again soon. I had bought my home two months before leaving for the course in Canada, renting out part of it to enable me to do so. My renters left days before my return. 

I unpacked my car and dumped everything in the entrance way, except an overnight bag, a couple of packets of sunflower seeds that I was determined to plant the next day, and a beautiful bird feeder in the shape of a cottage. You lifted its red sloping roof to pour the seed inside. 

I live in a townhouse where the kitchen and main living room is on the second floor 

There is a deck outside the kitchen and I hung that bird feeder on a wooden stand that was there when I bought the place, telling myself I would buy bird seed the next day.  And I would plant the sunflowers. 

It felt as though by doing so I was declaring - “I am finally home!” 

But still, I wondered how long it would before I had to leave again. I had no job lined up. I was trusting, once again, that the Lord would show me the way and provide. 

I remembered something I had asked the senior pastor at the Bible School I attended in London back in 1989.  After a particularly anointed lecture in faith, I had said, with the deepest sincerity, “Does the walk of faith get any easier?”

The senior pastor, an ex-ballet dancer who understood my creative spirit, really thought about the answer. Then he replied: “No Geraldine, it doesn’t. But it does become more familiar.” 

Simple words of incredible wisdom that I have recalled frequently over the intervening years. 

I hauled my case up to my third floor bedroom and crashed into bed in what was then the not so wee hours, way too soon before dawn. 

It was about ten o clock before I finally stirred. I threw up the blind and looked down on the kitchen deck one floor below. To my utter amazement I saw a tiny bird flying busily in and out of the bird feeder below. In those few hours of sleep a minuscule mother was building a nest!

I felt the Lord saying. “You will be staying for a long while. It is safe to nest.”

And it has been. 

I never did plant those sunflower seeds. I am not a gardener. But I had great joy in watching that nest. I would peek in whenever the mother left and marvel at the eggs. I saw those babies being launched. Then the nest was abandoned. I cleaned it out, filled the wooden house with seed, and had a lovely summer watching birds feed. 

I truly felt I was home. 

Later in the summer I came in the front door. Something bright caught my eye outside the back door on the ground floor deck. I went out there, and to my absolute amazement there was the biggest sunflower stalk I had ever seen. Branching off it were at least ten enormous sunflowers! I felt like I was seeing the equivalent of Jack’s beanstalk that had grown up overnight. But with sunflowers. 

Perhaps the birds had dropped seeds between the cracks of the deck above. 

All I know is that it wasn’t there, and then, miraculously it was. And before or since I have never seen anything like that type of giant sunflower. 

But I knew what it was. It was the Lord saying, “you wanted sunflowers. Here are sunflowers. A glorious bouquet of them. And darling, welcome home!”

And so now I am soaking in the wonder and beauty of this latest, dramatic, God-bouquet. Knowing it acknowledges the end of an intense, difficult, unforgettable season. 

Once again I have no idea what is in store. But I have been on this faith journey before. My senior pastor was right. It has become familiar. 

And so I know that the way will open. 

And it will be good.