I had been fasting for over a week when my sister came to town. I loved my sister but she was like a hurricane that completely disrupted our lives and turned everything into an uproar when she would come to town. She was my first trial by fire. When she found out that I had been fasting she tried to get me to eat by every means possible. I still felt strong and amazingly not hungry so I resisted the temptation. I came to realize through this that it is often the people closest to us that will try to lead us into temptation without even realizing it. She left a couple of days later and a few days after that, I began to feel very tired and weak and decided it was time to end the fast after almost two weeks. I had felt certain that the fast was God’s idea but now I felt rather desolate and alone. I reached out to the Father and Jesus but felt nothing. I missed feeling them. At mass the following Sunday everything began again and I could feel Jesus’ presence all around me, so tangible that I almost felt that I could reach out and touch him. I also felt his love surrounding me, so much so that I could have stayed in church forever. I hurried home, however, because our daughter had gotten sick a few days earlier and my husband and I were taking turns going to mass. I was also relieved feeling the Father and Jesus’ presence again because I had gotten a little nervous when I had seen the cover of the church bulletin that my son had brought home on Friday. Every week there was a picture on the front of the bulletin depicting one of the bible readings for that Sunday and the school children were given the bulletin on Friday to bring home to their parents. I had noticed that the drawings seemed to be reaffirming something I was going through each week with God. Well, this week it depicted Abraham ready to sacrifice Isaac. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I was afraid that God might test me as he had Abraham. As the priest had read that scripture passage I began thinking about it. While I felt that I loved the Father and Jesus more than anyone, including my children, to consider sacrificing a child for God seemed barbaric and a certain road to madness. I wondered how a loving God could consider asking such a thing.
While I was fixing dinner later that evening I began to feel Jesus’ presence again, this time so forcefully it was as if he was beginning to materialize in my kitchen. It was a strange sensation and difficult to describe. Shortly after dinner, my daughter took a turn for the worst. She became totally lethargic. She complained of being cold. I took her temperature and it was over 103 degrees. I gave her more Tylenol but she only grew worse. We tried calling the pediatrician but of course, got the answering service and left an urgent message to call us. My daughter’s temperature continued to climb and we began putting cool cloths on her head. Her eyes became glassy and constantly teared. The whites of her eyes were so bloodshot that they looked red. Her cheeks were flushed a dark pink and her little body felt as if she were burning up inside. As she lay there whimpering slightly my fear came back. Was God asking me, not to literally sacrifice a child as he had with Abraham, but rather to willingly let him take one? Up until that point, whenever I had thought of losing one of my children, I thought surely I could not go on living without even one of them, and as with all parents, it was my greatest fear. My daughter’s temperature hit 105 degrees even though we had given her the Tylenol. My husband put in another call to the pediatrician and we discussed what we would do if we didn’t get a call back in a few minutes. Trembling, I got up and walked into the kitchen, and began to talk to God. I remembered the homily (sermon) the priest had given at mass. He said that God had not asked something of Abraham that he himself was not prepared to do. After all, God would sacrifice Jesus for us and I remember thinking that it must have been terribly hard on the Father to have given him up to such a horrible death, and surely he must have cried a thousand tears as he watched Jesus suffer and die. I told the Father that I had never truly thought about how hard Jesus’ death must have been for him. I told him that since he had given me the children I would try to be brave if he decided to take them but to please help me to have the strength to weather it all. Tears were streaming down my face at that point as I tried to picture life without my little daughter. My eyes are filled with tears even now as I write this at the memory of it.
At that moment my husband called to me that her fever had begun to drop and the phone rang and it was the pediatrician. With her fever beginning to break she recommended waiting about an hour then giving her a stronger medicine and if it didn’t go back up to bring her in the morning. As I sat with my daughter I thought that if this had been a test, I guessed I had passed and been granted my daughter’s life. Someone else was not so lucky that night. A friend of ours had seen my husband at mass and told him that her brother-in-law, whom we had met a couple of times, had become gravely ill on Friday. We had been hearing about his trials of trying to buy a house in a better neighborhood. He had just finally moved into his new home with his wife and young son a few weeks earlier and now this. I had been praying for his recovery especially at mass that morning. As my daughter lay sleeping in my lap, our friend called to say that he had just died. I was stunned. I thought surely he would have recovered and here I was sitting with my daughter who had come down with some mysterious fever and was now rapidly recovering. I felt somehow guilty that I had been granted my daughter’s life and he had lost his. I think a little piece of me died with him that night.
