by Donna Poole
I really didn’t want to go. I was so tired, body, soul, and spirit, that my feet dragged as I walked to our meeting place.
Maybe this is why old ladies shuffle. Maybe it’s exhaustion.
I could feel my eyes wanting to close as I forced one foot ahead of the other. It wasn’t love so much as habit that was sending me to our yearly rendezvous. I wanted nothing more than to be home in bed cocooning with my blankets tucked tightly around me, shutting out the world. But we always meet in the garden on Resurrection Sunday and had since I’d met him. How long ago was that now? Thirty years? And so, I’d go, just like I’d gone to church this morning with no praise in my heart, just a hurting dullness. But I’d gone. Hopefully that counted for something.
I was almost relieved to see our usual bench was taken. A young couple sat there, holding hands and laughing amidst the lavender hyacinth and yellow daffodils. It was no place for my tears.
I retreated to a solitary spot near the lake under a weeping willow and almost hoped he wouldn’t find me. I had nothing to say this year. I didn’t have my usual bouquet of fragrant spring flowers to give him, no new song I’d written to sing, no poem to read to him. I clutched what I did have, a wrinkled brown paper bag, soggy with my tears. I sat on the damp ground, laid my head back against the tree, and fell asleep.
“There you are!” I woke to his kind voice. I would have cried again, but I had no tears left.
He sat beside me in silence for a long time.
The sun was sliding low before he spoke. It was just a word.
“Well?”
“Well what?”
“What have you brought me in the bag?”
“Oh, that’s nothing for you, nothing you’d want. It’s nothing I want either.”
“Then why do you carry it with you?”
“I don’t know what else to do with it.”
“May I see it?”
I shook my head.
“Do you want to talk about it?”
I shook my head again.
“It’s a broken relationship between two people you love, isn’t it? And your heart is in pieces because you think you could have done something to prevent it.”
I looked at him, astonished. “How do you know that?”
He threw his head back and laughed a laugh so sweet the mother robins stopped singing their babies to sleep to listen to the melody. “You ask me that on this day of all days? On my Resurrection Sunday? Have you forgotten who I am?”
I hung my head and whispered, “No, Lord. I guess my heartache got so big it made you look smaller. Forgive me. It’s just that this is so broken I don’t think even you can mend it. It’s unfixable.”
“I was a carpenter in Nazareth, remember. I have dried more tears and mended more hearts that you can begin to imagine. May I?”
I nodded, and he took the bag from my hands. He sighed when he saw the cuts on my hands that had come from the broken jagged thing inside that had torn through the bag and into my skin.
“You never should have tried to carry this.”
“I know.”
“And I can see your heart is bleeding worse than your hands.”
He looked inside the bag and winced. “This shattered pretty bad.”
“Oh, Lord, it was horrible!” More tears came from somewhere and poured down over my hands. “You should have been there!”
“I was. And I cried with you. Look.” He nodded at my hands. They had stopped bleeding.
“Thank you, dear Lord! Can you fix my heart and that…that mess…as quickly?”
He sighed, stood, and helped me stand. “I could if all were willing. This may take a long time. It may not be repaired until eternity. Will you trust and believe?”
“I believe, Lord. Help my unbelief! What should I do while I wait?”
He spoke one word before he walked away. “Love.”
I almost asked him if he knew how much love can hurt. But that would be a silly question to ask him of all people, especially on Resurrection Sunday.
The end
***
These blogs are now available in book form on Amazon:
Backroad Ramblings Volume One: Stories of Faith, Love, and Laughter
Backroad Ramblings Volume Two: Stories of Faith, Love, and Laughter
Backroad Ramblings Volume Three: Stories of Faith, Love, and Laughter
Backroad Ramblings Volume Four: Stories of Faith, Love, and Laughter
