But he was wounded for our transgressions, crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the punishment that made us whole, and by his bruises we are healed.”-Isaiah 53:5
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🙌He Arose! 🙌
As I prepared for Easter Sunday, I could not help but think of the many Easters I experienced with my family. My mind was heavy in thought especially 18 years ago when the phone ranged that Saturday afternoon. Everyone in my family was preparing for that Sunday either shopping for last-minute groceries for Easter dinner or cutting grass in which the latter is what my brother Terry was doing. He planned to finish and head down to my mom’s to deliver the sugar she had somehow forgotten when purchasing her grocery items. However, that would never happen. You see the call came from his daughter stating he had fallen in the yard while cutting grass and they could not get a response. What seemed to forever consist of instructions from my mom to my niece to check his pulse and wondering why the ambulance had not made it there by now? I remember my mother and I frantically getting in the car and rushing to his side 10 miles away praying that he had just fallen and he was ok. As we approached the stop sign of the 4 way the sun burst through the clouds as if heaven was opening up its doors welcoming someone in. Unfortunately, I didn’t want to claim it but it would be my brother Terry. The numb feeling I felt that day I can still remember it even 18 years later. As we traveled to the hospital following the ambulance with my brother Jeffery driving, I understood science and although I believed in miracles I knew from my glimpse in the back of the ambulance of them working on Terry, he had been out too long. We were praying from every corner, my sisters dropped all grocery shopping and we all gathered at his home of the fresh incomplete cut grass. As we walked into his yard after returning from the hospital we could not believe the lines that appeared in the area he did complete, his front lawn. Terry was the type of man that “Bloomed Where He Was Planted”. He didn’t let his handicap of having polio stop him from blooming. So as I was preparing our church for our drive-up Easter Service I ran across these two banners. My family still experience a little cloudy feeling during Easter but we hold steadfast to the understanding of we are going to go through “Handkerchiefs and Pearls” of life and that Terry, My Mother, and all our loved ones who have passed on would want us to “Bloom where WE are planted”.
