Slamming the trunk closed, Marcy sighed as she walked over to the driver’s door. She was ready to go home for the holidays.
Home.
More than a structure from her childhood. A place filled with people who loved her.
Shaking her head to clear the threatening tears, she slid behind the wheel and buckled up. For the first time in days, she looked at her face in the rearview mirror.
Her eyes looked old. They told a tale of far more life experience than her twenty-two years would suggest.
College was hard. Not so much the academic side, although she’d had to work plenty late hours with the books. No, doing and processing life on her own was not as freeing as she’d once envisioned.
Her declared major threw her into people’s hospital rooms and into their heart-wrenching situations.
She reflected on all the sad scenes she’d not only witnessed but was given a role in which to play. One night she was assigned a young teen in for a simple appendectomy, but was later diagnosed with leukemia.
Another night she cared for a gentleman whose lungs were slowly filling up with fluid. “We’ll keep him comfortable,” the charge nurse had promised his family. Marcy knew her job was to help keep him comfortable until he passed on.
Driving hours to reach home she thought about her childhood. Why did it seem so easy back then? As a little girl, she’d played among the trees in the afternoons and attended the little white church on Sundays.
She sighed again. Between school and work, she’d dropped her church attendance to maybe once a month.
Yet her heart searched for answers. Answers she thought she once knew. Maybe I need to get back to church. Maybe God has the answers.
She flipped on the radio contemplating if God could help dissolve her disillusionment over life and what she’d thought would be her life’s work.
A bible verse from long ago popped into her mind, “I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord,’” she thought there was more but couldn’t remember it.
“Lord, I truly hope you have plans for me,” she thought as she peered through the snowflakes falling on the windshield, “because I just don’t know anything anymore.”
She settled back into her seat as she sped toward home.
Reflections:
Have you ever felt like Marcy? How did you find your way out?
This is Part I in a series of three. Return here next Friday (December 15) to learn what Marcy discovers at home.