The Difference of Marie

[Jaltus-bot]

The deep blue of the sky swept on forever. The stars spread across the night sky like the angels and prophets God sent to the earth beckoned one to remember the greatest light and cherish even the little things that bring light into this dark world. The horizon had no end. The earth and sky went on forever to meet where they could not be seen. A land of rolling hills filled with trees and grassy clearings and towns continued off in the distance.

It was a night like that that Marie finally seemed to give another part of her heart to the Lord, to the one she knew should rule her as her king. It had been years of the same till finally in a moment of real honesty, all she could think to really say was thank you to God, thank you for loving her, for everything. She asked that her heart be one of a servant under Him. Though she didn’t know it, that night was to bring her closer to the greatest part of her journey to heaven. Marie got back up from her knees and went back inside to the safety of her home. There was nothing more for her to do that night but sleep.

The next few weeks and months seemed to carry on as they had before. Marie tried her best to seek the Lord, especially when she grew frustrated with the one dream she’d long had seeming so far away. Why, she wondered, did people have to keep bringing it up?

Ever since she was young, Marie wanted to be a nurse. During the epidemic some time ago, there had been a shortage of people in medicine where she lived. Her brother had gotten sick and before he died he had been treated by a doctor then just left for lack of any but her family who would be able at all to care for him. This made such an impact on her that it became her life’s ambition to go to be a nurse. When she was finally old enough, there always seemed to be some reason why she couldn’t go to school to be a nurse. About six months about that night, Marie was able to ho on full scholarship to study nursing.

Over the next few years things seemed to be going well. Marie became a nurse and got a job at a hospital, but as happens when one starts to rely on the things one sees in the world for security for the peace and well-being in one’s life, Marie again grew complacent in her faith. She would have done well to remember that no matter how nicely things go, disaster may still lie precariously close at hand and lives can change for the worse as easily as for the good and in only the blink of an eye.

Marie’s country had gone to way. People that she had known in childhood were going off to fight and reports of soldiers’ deaths shook her back to alertness both to God and to the purpose she had sought in youth. She could no longer feel peace in what she did until the day that she signed up to be a nurse for the military.

Marie tended as best she could to whatever sick or injured soldier was in her care. She wanted especially to tell two of these soldiers about the Lord. One of them it turned out had wandered away from following God as a teen and the other was raised never believing there was no god and he was far less receptive to what she said.

Though Marie never lived to see the latter soldier change, what she did really made a difference. One afternoon the fighting had come close enough to the hospital that patients started getting evacuated. Suddenly there were several explosions around the hospital and even hitting it. If Marie had simply left him where he was and left then she would have survived. He spoke fondly of her several times as the young woman who saved his life. By the end of the war, the soldier that Marie has saved had pledged to go to seminary and with the support of the other soldier Marie had spoken with as his friend he went on to become one of the greatest preachers their country had known.