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

[Eleanor Braun]

What a wonderful, wonder-filled, story.

Eleanor

On Mon, Feb 9, 2015 at 1:37 PM, Jay Weigel <jay.weigel at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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.
>