[Magdalen] They that wait on the Lord (repost)

[Jay Weigel]

This is a repost of part of an earlier e-mail which, on reflection, I think
belongs by itself. If you read it the first time and it didn't speak to
you, feel free to ignore.

Yesterday's OT reading was one of my favorite passages from Isaiah, "They
that wait on the Lord". For some reason, that always makes me think of a
home health patient we had back in the early 90s. She wasn't my patient;
she belonged to another nurse, one who trained me, but I met her my first
week, and the relationship between her and her nurse was one of the things
that bonded me to home health for a number of years. Miss Lucille was an
African-American lady of considerable age and dignity and great sweetness.
She and her husband had had a small dairy farm and raised a bunch of
children through the Depression in rural Hamblen County, TN, and she
enjoyed telling stories of that time. The one that has always stuck with me
has to do with her going to look for a cow that had gone missing during a
snow, and finding that the cow had given birth, but the calf was so weak it
could barely stand and the cow wouldn't leave it. She picked up the calf
and carried it back through the snow to the barn, and the mother followed.
Her nurse, also a farm girl but from Mississippi, said she bet that wasn't
the first calf Miss Lucille had carried home, and Miss Lucille allowed as
how that was so, "and not the only one in the snow, either!" She said God
would always give her the strength, and quoted that verse from Isaiah. Now
whenever I hear it, it always brings up the image of (a much younger) Miss
Lucille struggling through the snow with a newborn calf in her arms.
Somehow I think both she and God would like that.