IT HAPPENED OVERNIGHT [Su, 12-18-22]

 CHRIST IN WINTER: Reflections On Faith & Life For The Years Of Winter: IT HAPPENED OVERNIGHT [Su, 12-18-22]

 

The first time I can remember it was when I went down to breakfast one hot June morning at Howell Neighborhood House in the Pilsen neighborhood of Chicago. I was a social worker at HNH that summer, before my senior year in college, and also the Sunday preacher at the Wycliffe and Halstead Street Methodist Churches. Randy Robertson and I lived in the back room on the fourth floor. The summer social work girls and the professional staff lived on the third floor, closer to our common living room and kitchen.

That morning, I walked down the stairs and into the kitchen and thought, “What in the world happened overnight?”

There sat a vision of loveliness, a beautiful blond girl in short white shorts. “Oh,” she said, “I’m Marian. I just got in from California last night after everyone had gone to bed. I’m hungry, but I didn’t know what it’s okay to eat…”

I was used to being first up and fixing breakfast for everyone anyway, and she was pretty, so she ate well.

Then there was that time that I woke up in the hospital. They had taken me into the operating room at midnight, on my birthday. They told me to count back from one hundred and I think I got to 99 before I went out.

The next morning I woke up and counted the tubes going in and out of my body. There were more tubes than I had body openings for tubes! I thought, “What in the world happened overnight?”

The older we get, the more of those overnight changes there are. We’re going along just fine, and suddenly, everything is different. Some are pleasant, like having to eat breakfast with a California girl. Some are not so pleasant, like Nazi nurses coming into your room and making you get up to walk before you even know what’s happened to you.

And some will be like that inn-keeper, going out to the stable to check on his lowly guests the next morning, and finding a bunch of dirty shepherds and pristine angels hanging out together around a crib with a little baby in it. “What in the world happened overnight?”

You’ll be forever marked. You’ll always wonder what happened to Marian after that summer in Chicago, and you’ll always wonder what happened to that part of you, both physical and emotional, that the surgeons cut out. You’ll always wonder what became of that baby who was born with so much promise.

I think maybe heaven will happen that way. You’ll wake up and say, “What in the world happened overnight?” You’ll always wonder…

John Robert McFarland