Grand Piano in the Airport--and "You Are My Hiding Place"

 Last Saturday when Crystal and I arrived at the Mesa, AZ, airport, we discovered a shiny black grand piano posing in the corner near the carousel, just waiting to be played!

 

I encouraged Crystal to play something, so she chose "I Have the Joy, Joy, Joy Down in My Heart," and "You Are My Hiding Place." 

 

"You are my hiding place. I will trust in You." Beautiful words and melody both. I stood nearby, watching and listening, as did many others.
"Please tell your friend thank you for playing," one lady came to me to say. I told her that was my daughter, and that I would tell her. 

One never knows what might happen inside an airport on the way to a cancer clinic.

Monday after my blood labs were drawn and my first IVs done, we came home to our little house at Gospel Center and folded newsletters and stuffed, addressed, and stamped envelopes. I had brought the newsletters down and Crystal had looked in three different stores to find envelopes--to no avail! We found a box of personal size envelopes in a Goodwill! I refolded some of the letters, and we got them sent.

This is similar to one of the pictures I have in the newsletter--Jonathan and me holding up the star quilt that Beth Montour's family gifted us after Beth's funeral. It meant so much to me. 

We had to leave the funeral meal before everything was over as I was unable to manage such a long evening, so we weren't there when the quilt would have been presented. 

So it was Sunday night after church meal at Mission, as Jonathan and I were getting ready to leave, that Kim Lavery rushed over with a big bag and let us know the Montour family had wanted me to have this quilt. 

I took one look and realized that out of all the dozen or more quilts displayed behind the casket, flowers, and memory posters, this was the quilt that I had liked the most!

I remembered noticing those colors and deciding those were my favorite colors of all the ones there.

And didn't that very quilt come into our home as a gift--

the quilt hanging silently behind the wooden cross that Ned Sherman had crafted for Beth's wake and funeral and burial.

I am amazed at the beauty that God is bringing into my cancer journey.

Every time I had come to Arizona in recent months, I'd tried to go at least once to visit Beth who had the same kind of cancer. I discovered what a beautiful family she had--so loving and devoted and yet who allowed her the freedom to make her own personal choices about her health care, and who cared tenderly for her to the end. 

As I watch (as Hannah did the other day) what may be the gathering storm in my own cancer journey, with the cancer literally blowing up right under my eyes in the last week and a half, I find myself needing a hiding place--a shelter in the time of storm.

Two weeks ago, a storm tore through Winner, SD, the town where Beth lived and where Ned and Judy Sherman live and minister at the Raymond Montour Memorial Chapel.  

This granary fell over on a tractor near there.

At home, we'd heard that baseball-size hailstones were headed our way, so Crystal parked her car up close to the garage and covered it with tarp and cardboard battened down with heavy logs the best she could! The protection probably wouldn't have stayed long if the wind had been bad, but thankfully the storm bypassed us. 

We don't know if, in the future, the storm will hit and blow away what is precious or valuable to us, but we do know that God is our hiding place, and that He is a shelter in the time of storm. 

Our efforts at protecting and saving ourselves are so pitiful, so small, like cardboard over a windshield. But You, O my God, are my hiding place, and I will trust in You.