HEAVY HEARTED

Hello! My name is Jeanne Davis and I am the last of the five "bloggers." I have been married for 32 years to my husband Randy, who has been a pastor since the beginning of our marriage.

I am honored to be a part of this new endeavor, although in all honesty I am not very savvy when it comes to computers. I have thought for weeks about what I wanted to share and what I would say and then - as life does sometimes - circumstances changed drastically in my life. Now what I share comes from a very personal standpoint...

At the beginning of this blog, it was mentioned about the many hats we wear as minister's wives. It's true - we are wives, mothers, Sunday School teachers, Ladies Ministry Directors, counselors, friends. The list goes on and on. But for me, I laid down one of those hats 2 weeks ago today - that of being a daughter.

My mom passed away quite suddenly on April 14th, exactly 10 years to the day that we had my daddy's funeral. Although her heart had been weak for a year or so and she dealt with the problems associated with being a diabetic, she was relatively healthy for a 87-year old lady. But on Monday morning I received the kind-of-phone-call we all dread. They had taken her to the hospital by ambulance and within an hour she was put on a ventilator. Because she lived in Mobile, Alabama it is a 9 hour drive for us. Randy was in Knoxville at the hospitals making visits and by the time he got home and we packed it was 2 hours before we could leave. God was so gracious though and we got to the hospital just in time for the last ICU visiting time at 8:30 p.m. We stayed until 9:30 and after spending a few minutes with my brothers and sisters we left the hospital to go spend the night with my sister, who happens to live less than 5 minutes from the hospital. Because of the ventilator, they had sedated my mom so she was not awake. Right towards the end of the visit she became restless and the nurse told us that we should probably let her go back to sleep. She asked us just to kiss her cheek before we left but not talk to her so she would not wake up and fight the tube. How I wish I had not listened to her and said the things I would have wanted to...

We left the hospital at 9:45 and went back to my sister's. We had just sat down and started talking when I a got a call on my cell phone from my brother saying that mama had taken a turn for the worse. We jumped in the car and was back at the hospital in 5 minutes flat! As we ran into the ICU unit I saw mama's nurse just standing there with a surprised look on her face. My mom had gone on to be with the Lord!!! She had fallen back to sleep and literally her heart just stopped.

Now I am walking down a very unfamiliar path. I am in all reality an "orphan". It is a strange feeling not having a parent here on earth anymore. Oh I know that I will see them again in glory, and for that I am VERY grateful, but just because we are believers, or even minister's wives, it doesn't take away the pain of the reality that we will not see them again this side of heaven.

You know for ministers and their families, death is as much a part of life as birth. How many times have we stood with families over the bed of a loved one that had passed away or stood with them beside a casket at a funeral home or a grave at the cemetery? We seem to do that all the time. But again, I am reminded that this is a difficult path to walk down. Thank God He promises never to leave us or forsake us!!!

Jeanne