And
now, Lord, for what do I wait? My hope is in Thee. ~~ Psalm 39:7
Dinner was ready. My husband Bill
should have been home an hour earlier.
The brightness of a day-time
snowstorm had turned to early dark. I’d fed the baby through his colicky fussiness.
The clock kept ticking.
I started to fret and stew. It
was the day before Thanksgiving and I knew Bill had made no insurance
appointments for that evening.
After I finished cleaning up the
kitchen, I went from window to door, and kept checking the clock.
Long after dark, the phone rang.
“We’re at the hospital,” Bill’s co-worker Mike announced.
I gasped in shock.
“We’re okay, but Bill has to
stay. He’s sedated.”
“What happened?” I managed to
croak.
“He went up on the garage roof
with a shovel to scrape the snow off the plywood.”
Thank God Bill hadn’t been alone.
Bill’s fall off the
two-and-a-half-story garage roof was so much bigger than me.
I had no choice but to cry out to
God during those first dark hours. By the time Mike had called, the kids were
in bed and it was too late for me to ask anyone to come over.
Early Thanksgiving morning, I
curled my hair and dressed in red, Bill’s favorite color on me.
And my heart felt as crushed and
swollen as his poor feet. They looked like footballs resting on the pillow at
the foot of the raised hospital bed.
In the waiting room I picked up a
paperback Bible. Many verses were familiar, but The Psalms drew me to acquaint
myself with God on a personal level.
His Word, since I was too full of
shock to form my own prayers, became my prayer. And it was my only solace for
three days while we all waited for the surgery Bill’s “broken eggshell” heels.
I took that Bible home and never considered
it stealing. God had given me an incredible gift.
What an eventful year 1975 had been.
In February, we bought an acreage and planned our dream home.
In late April my father was
murdered.
And our son was born three weeks
following that event.
That May, the basement was dug and
we started framing our home.
During Bill’s surgery, I recalled
the year’s craziness. I also devoured the Word and prayed some more.
Bill was a straight-commission
insurance salesman and he didn’t work for three months.
I was grieving through the
traumatic unanswered questions concerning my father’s homicide, and the way my
mother was not handling it at all.
Before Bill’s fall my prayers had
mostly been by rote, or whenever I felt the real need to pray, I’d recite the
Lord’s Prayer.
Eventually, I watched in horror
as the six-inch steel pins were yanked from Bill’s ankles with a huge pair of
pliers.
Praying through the Psalms and the
events that year prepared my heart for the next April when I realized amongst
all the blessings, Jesus had been missing from my life. I prayed the most vital
prayer of all: the sinner’s prayer of salvation.
My hope is ever in Him and He is
only a prayer away.
A Blessed Blue Christmas
By LoRee Peery
Dahlia Delisi has poured her life
into her store, The Blue Dahlia. Once her faith was strong, and her life
was on a different course. But when Sloan Letheby left town, Dahlia
drifted away from God.
Sloan Letheby has been transformed. His brush with death brought new meaning to his faith in God, and he needs to right old wrongs. However, there's a murder plot in the way of his reunion with Dahlia. Can he find a killer before it's too late? And can Dahlia accept him...and God, back into her life?
Sloan Letheby has been transformed. His brush with death brought new meaning to his faith in God, and he needs to right old wrongs. However, there's a murder plot in the way of his reunion with Dahlia. Can he find a killer before it's too late? And can Dahlia accept him...and God, back into her life?
About LoRee Peery
LoRee Peery is a lifelong Nebraskan who thanks her mother
for teaching her to read when she was four. LoRee has devoured books ever
since.
She and her husband have tackled some interesting
projects over the course of their married life. For one, they built the home
they live in with their own hands. They used to want more acres further away
from city life, but one day LoRee realized they had their “greener on the other
side of the fence” already. All it took was removing the hedge made of trees and
bushes.
LoRee feels grounded in her sense of place and considers it a blessing to
have lived most of her life in the country. She is also blessed to have five
children and eleven grandchildren. www.loreepeery.com
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