Healing...

January 4, 2023 - 4am

The phone rang, reaching my ears only because I was primed to hear it, anticipating the automated call announcing school's cancellation due to the blizzard. It felt so early, what time was it? I reached to answer the phone only so it would stop ringing. 

But the number didn't say SoWashCo. "Hello?" I managed to find that word through the stupor of sleep. A sickening terror ran through me as I recognized Kevin's wordless voice, agony flooding the "Uh.....Uh....Uh," he kept repeating. 

---

February 2023

I sat in Adoration, ready to begin unpacking all that I had merely collected in January. That phone call had thrown half of me into a coma, while the other half lived in a highly-functional cocoon of grace and disbelief. 

January had been both horror and heaven swirling within and around each of us. How was that even possible? It was enough then merely to survive it. I had collected each memory "for later" and "later" must be now. I'd never done this before, where did one begin? My comatose half was buried with the memories and I must search for and awaken myself and work towards being whole. Surely I must go back to the beginning. The phone call.

"No," He said. Jesus spoke to me directly, "Not the beginning."

Confusion. "Where, then?" I asked. "Take me where I need to go."

"Here." He said, unexpectedly placing me towards the end, in the hardest, loneliest, most incapacitating moment of it all. It was a place I would not have chosen to return first; I didn't have the courage to go there, but here I was.

"Look up." He said. It was an invitation, but one not to be refused. In my mind's eye, in the memory, I looked, and where I had been utterly alone and in terror, I saw two figures in front of me, enormous, tremendously solid, more real than myself. I could see only from their knees to mid-torso. Without seeing any characteristics, I knew the one to my right was an angel, and the one in front of me, slightly left, was Mary.

I have never been given an image like this. If I were to imagine it, it would not be what I saw. 

With my St. Peter-esque personality, rather than being quick to be consoled, I was alarmed and confused and I lashed out, "Why, in that moment, is Mary with me?! Why is she not with Heidi?!!" 

"Jesus is with Heidi. Mary is with you at the foot of the cross," came the gentle response.

Tears. Consolation. Undeserved mercy.

He took me first where the wound was the greatest because He is not just a comforter, He is a healer.

That memory has become my treasure.