Story About Mabel Mabel grew up on a small farm that she managed with only her mother until her mother died. Then she ran the farm alone until 1950 when her blindness and sickness sent her to a convalescent hospital. For twenty-five years, she got weaker and sicker with constant headaches, backaches, and stomach aches. Then the cancer came. My First Visit I happen to meet her when I was visiting the nursing home in which she lived. On this particular day, I was walking in a hallway that I had not visited before, looking for a few people who were alive enough to receive a flower and a few words of encouragement. This hallway seemed to contain some of the worst cases. They were strapped onto carts or into wheelchairs and looking completely helpless. As I neared the end of the hallway, I saw this old woman strapped into a wheelchair. Her face was an absolute horror. The empty stare and white pupils of her eyes told me that she was blind. The large hearing aid over one ear told me that she was almost deaf. One side of her face was being eaten by cancer. There was a discolored and running sore covering part of one cheek. It had pushed her nose to one side, dropped one eye and distorted her jaw so that what should have been the corner of her mouth was the bottom of her mouth. As a consequence, she drooled constantly. I was later told that when new nurses arrived for work their first day that supervisors would send them to feed this woman, thinking that if they could stand this sight, they could stand anything else. This Was Mabel This was Mabel. She was now 89 years old. She had been in this nursing home 25 years, blind, bedridden, nearly deaf, and all alone with no family. I don’t know why I spoke to her that day. She looked less likely to respond than most of the people I saw in that hallway. But, I put a flower in her hand and said, “Here is a flower for you. Happy Mother’s Day.” She held the flower up to her face and tried to smell it, then she spoke. And much to my surprise, her words, although somewhat garbled because of her deformity, were obviously produced by a clear mind. She said, “Thank you. It’s lovely. But, can I give it to someone else? I can’t see it, you know, I’m blind.” I said, “Of course.” And I pushed her in her chair back down the hallway to a place where I thought I could find some alert patients. I found one, and I stopped the chair. Mabel held out the flower and said, “Here, this is from Jesus.” Then, It Began To Dawn On Me . . . That was when it began to dawn on me that this was not an ordinary human being. Later, I wheeled her back to her room and learned more about her history. Mabel and I became friends over the next few weeks and I went to see her once or twice a week for the next three years. Her first words to me were usually an offer of hard candy from a tissue box near her bed. Some days I would read to her from the Bible, and often when I would pause, she would continue reciting the passage from memory, word-for-word. On other days, I would take a book of hymns and sing with her and she knew all the words to the old songs. She would often stop in mid-hymn and make a brief comment about the lyrics she considered particularly relevant to her own situation. I never heard her speak of loneliness or pain except in the stress she placed on certain lines in certain hymns. Mabel, What Do You Think About? It was not many weeks before I turned from a sense that I was being helpful to her to a sense of wonder that she was helping me. I started taking a pen and paper to write down the things she would say. The question occurred to me, “What does Mabel have to think about hour after hour, day after day, week after week, and year after year. She’s doesn’t even know if it’s day or night. So, I went to her and asked, “Mabel, what do you think about when you lie here?” And she said, “I think about Jesus.” I sat there and thought for a moment about the difficulty for me of thinking about Jesus for even five minutes. I asked her, “What do you think about Jesus?” She replied slowly and deliberately as I wrote every word down. She said, “I think about how good he’s been to me. He’s been awfully good to me in my life you know. . I’m one of those kind who’s mostly satisfied. . . . Lots of folks wouldn’t care for what I think. Lots of folks would think I’m kind of old fashioned. But I don’t care. I’d rather have Jesus. He’s all the world to me.” I could not help but think, “This is not fiction.” This is real life. A human being really lives like this. I know. I knew her. How could she do it? Seconds ticked and minutes crawled and so did the days and weeks and months and years of pain without human company and without an explanation of why it was all happening. Mabel Had An Incredible Power The answer, I think, is that Mabel had something that you and I don’t have much of. She had power. Lying there in her bed, unable to move, unable to see, unable to hear, unable to talk to anyone, she had incredible power. Here was an ordinary human being who received supernatural power to do extraordinary things. Her entire life consisted of following Jesus as the best she could in her situation: patient endurance of suffering, solitude, prayer, meditation on Scripture, worship, fellowship when it was possible, giving when she had a flower or piece of candy to offer. Imagine being in her condition and saying, “I think about how good he’s been to me. He’s been awfully good to me in my life, you know. . . I’m one of those kind who’s mostly satisfied.” I actually believe I had seen the 23rd Psalm come to life. “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.” For anyone who really saw Mabel- - who was willing to “turn aside”- - -a hospital bed became a burning bush. It became a place where this ordinary and pain filled world was visited by the presence of God. When others saw the life in that hospital bed, they wanted to take off their shoes. It was almost like standing on holy ground. Is Such A Life Possible For An Ordinary Human Being? Do you believe such a life is possible for an ordinary human being? Do you believe it’s possible for you? This is promised in the gospel and is the good news proclaimed by Jesus: “The kingdom of God has come near; repent and believe in the good news.” Are you radically captivated by Jesus like Mabel was? Is Jesus the real thing in your life or are you living a mediocre and trivial version of the Christian life? The Greatest Danger See, the greatest danger is not that we renounce our faith, but that we will settle for a mediocre version of it. An Excerpt from the book, The life You’ve Always Wanted by John Ortberg
Posted on: Tue, 11 Jun 2013 15:12:12 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015