Upside Down: Light in a Dark Time

Two weeks ago my daily life turned upside down.

It happened this way. In the midst of a joyful Thanksgiving gathering, my husband began to show stroke symptoms. Our EMT/police officer nephew, together with a family MD, drove us to the local hospital where Larry had a severe stroke while he was being evaluated. Immediately he and I were airlifted to a large medical center where the neurosurgeons were ready to operate. After three surgeries and ten days in hospital, he recovered sufficiently so that I could bring him home! Here at home, he is continuing his amazing recovery.

I don’t have words to express our gratitude for the availability and miracles of medical science, for skilled practitioners and gifted caregivers, for family who noted Larry’s early symptoms, and for the helicopter that lifted us above Pennsylvania’s twisting mountain roads and smoothly set us on the front lawn of the Penn State Hershey Medical Center. I know so well that “it might have been otherwise,” as Jane Kenyon wrote in her poem “Otherwise.”

What has moved me most deeply during this time and repeatedly brought me to tears is the overwhelming sense of being wrapped in love. We have been surrounded and upheld by loving thoughts and prayers from our family, friends, co-workers, patients, clients, and even some whose lives touched ours only slightly. We received cards, texts and emails from around the world, from our exchange student daughters in Germany and Japan and our granddaughters studying in Canada and Spain. Like endless circles of Hanukkah candles lifting their light in dark December, we have been bathed in the light of love, and it has strengthened our hope as we’ve journeyed through these dark days.

Being the recipient of so much love and tender care has reminded me that we all are containers holding an endless supply of Divine Love. I believe that each of us has “that of God within us” as Quakers have traditionally said. We can send the light of that Love out to surround and uphold each other. I have believed this for a long time, but to experience it, to be on the receiving end of it has deeply touched me.

We humans really are capable of sending out tons of love! We touch others’ lives with small acts and quick notes, with loving prayers and homemade bread. And often we don’t know what a deep blessing we have brought to others at a time when they needed it. If those whose love surrounded Larry and me and our family knew how much their candles of love have lit our way and given us hope, they’d be astonished.

We received love from a client who gave a pot of soup to her daughter (a hospital employee) to give to me, from the nurse who gave me a hug when he saw I needed it, from the text I received that started out “I don’t know if you remember me but. . .” Love rises from the wall of cards in our kitchen and from the friend who offered to help us set up our Christmas tree. So many faces of love, so many ways of sending it to others!

As I feel tears of gratitude gathering again, I invite you to commit anew to the spiritual practice of spreading love wherever it is needed. (which is, of course, everywhere!) May we adopt as our own the daily prayer of Father Tim from Jan Karon’s books: Make me a blessing to someone today. May we carry that prayer through this dark December and into the new year.

If this message has spoken to you, please share it with others.