Sprung!

"Breathe, Mamaw, breathe!" She heard the home health nurse yelling in her ear. To the caregiver, she yelled, "Call 911!"

She watched the red box on her finger flash off and on, red lights that convinced her it was not just a show box. Paramedics loaded her onto a gurney, shoved her into the ambulance, and off they went, speeding down the driveway. Inconsolable, she watched her beautiful, familiar treetops in the yard, on the driveway, on the road, through town, on the highway. Weeping, groaning out loud, she could not stop. She was out of control.

"Will I ever see my beautiful treetops again?"

She thought, I'm going to die.

She did not die. The Lord introduced her to a new world. She met nurses from the Caribbean who wanted to help her live. She met olive-skinned young men who wanted to show her how to walk again. Big women who called her darlin' moved her in the bed and brought her pillows. Young White men teased her into submission for tests on big machines, which were always cold to the touch. On Christmas Day, she listened to cleaning ladies sing carols as they mopped and picked up trash in her room and hallway. She tried to understand what doctors with heavy accents were trying to tell her. She was not afraid. The Lord had already been there ahead of her, preparing the way.

While she was sprung to a place called rehabilitation, they learned they had lost her papers. She spent the night in a corner of a large room, her sack of personal items tucked under her sheet. Her meds eventually caught up with her. The breakfast tray found her, even had her name neatly typed on a paper in it. Two weeks there assured her of a place at the four-person table, where she laughed at incredible stories and lost some of her dignity, as did everybody else.

"Mom, you will like this place, up on top of a mountain. We can move you this weekend." Sprung again, she was moved to her mountaintop chalet, believing she would spend her last days or years there in assisted living, another lower level of care.

Her children took her to buy new furniture, to get her hair done, to eat out, even to two more trips to the hospital for changes in meds and procedures, until routine set in. After several months of changing seasons on the mountain, then a quarantine, a rest-in-place order, and inconveniences of truck food delivery, they understood a new rule: nobody in, nobody out, nobody to watch anything that might be happening in her nursing home. She had clandestine time with her family under the carport in the front seat of the car. In the place of the lowest level of care, she felt the need of prayer the most.

In the dark of night, she awoke to hear a loud, distinct voice say clearly, "Go home." Was it her Lord Christ? Surely it was. He was preparing the way.

As she stood in her yard, she gazed admiringly, gratefully, lovingly, at her treetops. "Praise, prais...