In the last several months life has taken me some places I never thought I’d go, never wanted to go, didn’t think I’d have to go back to, or couldn’t have predicted I would go.
It was on one such throw back trip I was confronted with something from my past.
It was in the days when Covid was still super scary, an N-95 was my most donned accessory.
In the days before my life seemed to slowly and simultaneously suddenly implode, it was in the days when my world at work revolved around three-twelves, relief charge, a constant achy body and depletion was my baseline.
It was in the days when I questioned my very purpose in life and asked the King regularly if He wouldn’t mind letting me know.
I had picked up a local publication and was perusing it in the break room. I came across something that stopped me in my already exhausted tracks, it was an advertisement for the very place of my employment.
“We work tirelessly to help kids get well because the world needs to see what Natalie dreams up.”
It stopped me cold. I had asked the King for a purpose and here before me in my favorite mediums, newsprint, ink, and words was the answer to why…I promptly tore the page from the publication and made some edits.
Heading: “When you need a reminder why..”
“We work tirelessly (underlined twice for emphasis) to help kids get well because the world needs to see what (Natalie crossed out) they all (inserted above) dream (“s” crossed out) up.”
I then hung it on the break room refrigerator. That was October of 2021.
My nursing life would later take me to another place and I’ll admit I completely forgot about the message on the break room fridge until recent weeks.
I am in need of funds that can be supplemented by the picking up of extra shifts, extra shifts that had landed me right back from whence I once came. It was a sunny Saturday, the DT as I’ve long called it was moving on up to “The BR” and like any family that moves things were being sorted and situated all around. The break room was no exception.
Maybe it was the sparsity of it all that made me notice that clipped to the side of the fridge was a yellowed piece of paper, I wondered what it was. It was familiar but hadn’t yet registered.
I read the edited advertisement and I knew the handwriting at once.
I remembered, the why…and I’d left it and there years before and there it had stayed. I wondered how many eyes had seen it in the nearly half a decade since. I wondered if it had served others like it had me, and I wondered if that small act had been like so many other small acts in that very place, rippling through time growing bigger and outwardly as time went on.
I wondered and I marveled at how I found myself in the same spot, doing the same thing, asking the same questions and here by my very own hand, in a previous time of desperation was the answer preserved on the break room frigidaire.
Life had turned sideways but it wasn’t without purpose, the pain wasn’t being wasted and the gifts of grace that were being shared and were to await would serve as confirmation.
The Lord is not bound by time or space, paychecks, living arrangements, moves to different places or returns to previous ones. He is not surprised or caught off guard by anything, he is not afraid of the future and what it holds. The posted newsprint from the past affirming that He is already there and has been the whole time.
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