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The God of Jacob is our refuge.
Summer was kind that year, encouraging long walks on the South Downs—those gentle, rolling hills which sheltered my mother's house in Eastbourne, England. Two of our five children were along for the three-week holiday, revelling in playing on the miles of sandy beach at low tide, teaching their two cousins to skateboard, exploring the dungeons of Pevensey Castle, and asking their Grandma for a story. Our daughter—an early riser in those days—would creep out of bed, tiptoe downstairs and climb into bed with my mother for the early morning ritual of tea and cookies, accompanied by Grandma's hilarious tales of her growing up years. The voices and laughter of the two women—one old, one very young—gentled my journey of mid-life and steadied the swing of realization that I was daughter, mother, and woman—in the cycle of birth, life and death.
One Sunday morning, I heard the now-familiar sound of bare feet on the stairs and snuggled a little more deeply into the comfort and warmth of my childhood bed, waiting for the refrain of voices and giggles to begin. Instead, bare feet came thumping back up the stairs, and my daughter's voice crying, wailing, "Mommy! Mommy! It's Grandma. She needs you!" I flew into action, checking on my mother, calling the doctor, comforting the children, sitting with my mother, calling my brother and sister-in-law, bracing my response as the doctor diagnosed a heart attack and called an ambulance, finally collecting those personal items I knew Mom would need and appreciate in the hospital, especially her pink woolly bedjacket. Two hours later a nurse allowed me a short visit at my mother's bedside in the intensive care unit. Pain clutched at her chest, but my mother wanted to talk of her childhood, of her painful marriage, of her four children, of need for God's acceptance. Now I was her mother, tucking the pink bed jacket around her cold neck and shoulders, daughter listening as she spoke her life story, priest as she asked if God would accept her with a failed marriage. "Yes, God accepts you," I said, knowing her years of faithful pilgrimage with Christ.
Once back in my childhood home, I leaned my elbows on the cool white enamel of the old kitchen table and stared at the neighbor's red tile roof next door, numb and yet shaken on levels I could not yet touch. A breeze was kicking up, clouds swept in, and I reflected on how warm and safe the red roof looked through the window, and how many times I had stared at that roof between homework assignments as a highschooler. Rain began to splatter the window, distorting the picture, dulling the red. The sunny day had suddenly turned gray, windy, and wet. As I continued sitting still, receptive to the change outside, a shift of awareness came like a gentle but penetrating light into my fearful child-soul. Long after the red roof would be no more, the changing sky would still be there. I was beginning to let go of my mother, my buffer between me and the brink of eternity. Now I could stand on the edge and begin to trust the leap into the unknown of life beyond death and beyond my control. Heaven was safe, eternal, lasting, more lasting than this life, this present earth.
God is our refuge and strength,
a very present help in trouble.
Therefore we will not fear, though
the earth should change...
Be still, and know that I am God!
Psalm 46.1, 2,10
Wendy J. Miller
Eastern Mennonite Seminary
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