All Things work together for good...so says the WORD, but do they really?
Last week we saw this at work in my husband's family...want to hear a testimony?
My brother-in-law died on Friday the 13th ( :-)). What is so unusual about that? people die all the time...
Roy was 76 YO. When he was 16 YO back in 1952, he was stricken with three different kinds of polio. He was in an iron lung for a month - most people will not survive that this long. He recovered but not without disabilities. He never could run, or physically work hard since then. One side of his body quit growing so you can imagine what that would be like.
This changed the course of this family radically. No family decision was made without considering Roy or how it will effect him or how they can accommodate him. Not only then but in all the years since - this was their mindset, mentality.
He eventually walked with two crutches and then married in 1961, fathering three children. He attended business school in order to learn a skill where he could support a family. This he did until he was stricken with post-polio-syndrome.
In the past few years he was bed-ridden and his life was dependent on the use of a bi-pap (sp?) machine. His mind was alert, bright but his body refused to co-operate.
On a Tuesday, his wife tripped over a cord he had misplaced, breaking the upper part of her femur bone. She was rushed to the hospital in severe pain; surgery was done on Wednesday. The children were running hither and yon between the home and the hospital. They were tired, exhausted.
On Friday morning there was a power failure, stopping the bi-pap machine. The machine has an alarm that will sound when there is a power failure. Roy will also cry out when it happens - his voice could be heard through the entire house. But nobody heard the alarm this Friday morning; neither did they hear his cry, even though a son was sleeping in the bedroom right next to his. The power resumed after one hour and twenty minutes. When they got up in the morning no one knew there was an outage until they noticed the digital clocks blinking. Immediately, they went to check on their dad and he was gone...he had died.
So, what was so unusual about that? His wife was very protective of him. She refused to attend events out of town for fear Roy would would die and then she would feel guilty because she was not doing her duty.
So, #1, God removed her from the house through no fault of her own. That way she could never blame herself for being irresponsible in caring for him.
#2: A transformer at a nearby sawmill blew up causing the power outage. This was not because of any human failure but simply nature at work.
#3: Nobody heard or was aware of any power failure until long after the fact. It seems God put the son and the daughter (who is a nurse) in a stupor so they could not hear and alarms).
God made things easy for the family, so easy there exists no room for any feelings of irresponsibility that could have caused his death.
Broken bone, transformer blowing up - who would have guessed that God would use these events in tandem to take his child home?
Usually, one does not see immediately the reason for breakdown of equipment, failures. Or any other bad thing. Most of the time it seems to take years until one could see the connection. But not so, this time. When I heard that Roy died and why, I was amazed at the working of the LORD.
Roy was high maintenance but he was a man who read voraciously, loved the LORD and talked a lot about Him to who ever came around and there were people that did.
"Well done, thou good and faithful servant...enter thou into the joy of thy LORD..." and I suspect he was leaping and running - something he could not do for 60 years...
God is good...
