Post by MIRIAM JACOB on Jul 15, 2013 23:29:47 GMT -5
Miracle in the Mirror
Nita Edwards and Mark Buntain
WITH
Ron Hembree and Doug Brendel
CONTENTS
6 Fatherless
7 In the Pit
8 Window on the World
9 The Eighth Face
10 Emergency Call
____________________________
6
FATHERLESS
He had died the day after her thirteenth birthday. Now, as she neared her twenty-third birthday, almost six months after her arrival at the hospital, she thought more and more about him.
He had been one of Sri Lanka's most prominent faces, a man renowned and respected - and rich. He had found wealth in the chambers of the law, and he had built his estate carefully and wisely, as any crafty lawyer should. He was a judge in the city of Batticaloa, where Nita and her brother were reared. He was her father.
Nita loved her father as she would love no one else. He taught her to play tennis and to swim. She had been afraid of the water -she would only put her toes in - until the judge rescued her from everybody's taunting and teasing and lifted her up on his shoulders. Together they strode out into the Indian Ocean. There she was, four-year-old Nita, dangling her legs in the water and kicking and squealing with delight. She wasn't afraid any more; her daddy was the rock. At the end of that day they had to drag her out of the water because she was having too much fun to leave it.
The Edwards were fifth generation Episcopalians, proud of the Anglican Church, taught to be proper in every facet of life; they were clean, orderly, and educated people - nothing less would suffice. Social graces were high priorities, and the "dignity" of the human being was emphasized.
Nita was engrossed in her education at a proper school on Sri Lanka's west coast when her father had his first heart attack. He was a dynamo, always joking about dying in harness. "You never know," he used to say with a chuckle, "I might just pop off suddenly someday." And Mrs. Edwards would always return with, "Dad, don't say that. You were a fatherless child; I was a fatherless child. God will never let that happen to our children." But .. .
He was driving fifty miles to his chambers each day and the pace was wearing. At the end of a typical return trip, he collapsed on his bed, complaining of chest pains. At the hospital, his condition was labelled critical, and the Edwards family flew in all the best cardiovascular specialists they could. Two days later the judge suffered a massive, thumping heart attack. The specialists wrote him off. But he was still in harness - he refused to die.
For nearly three weeks he hung on. His wife sat by his side nearly around the clock, sponging him and shaving him herself, sometimes refusing even to break away for a shower. She gave him every injection, administered the bedpan, and stood watch at death's door.
Slowly he regained strength.
Very early one morning he began tossing restlessly.
His wife got up and walked toward him.
"What time is it?" he whispered hoarsely.
"Two."
The judge smiled, "It's our daughter's birthday, then."
In those wee hours, Judge Edwards dictated a cable:
"Loving birthday greetings to darling daughter. May God's sheltering wings protect you and guide you all along life. With love and kisses, Dad and Mother."
Usually Nita had a huge birthday party at the hostel in Colombo where she lived while she was in school. But today there was no party planned. Mrs. Edwards wanted to impress the children with the gravity of Father's condition. Nita's aunt, her mother's twin, was to come by the hostel at nine o'clock the next day to take her home to spend a day with her cousins - a substitute for the cancelled party.
At eight, Nita lined up with her mates for daily inspection. Her locker was in order, her shoes were shiny black, and as she stood erect, waiting for the matron, a slashing abdominal pain doubled her over. She dropped to her knees and clung to the bedpost, praying. The pain grew more intense every second for a full twenty minutes, and then finally it stopped as suddenly as it had begun.
Nita waited soberly in the foyer until her aunt came. They drove to her neighbourhood and walked toward the house. Coming to meet them was another uncle - not this aunt's husband, but the husband of her father's sister. He had come looking for Nita's aunt.
Nita smiled broadly at him, but he ignored her.
"Hm! The old boy doesn't even greet me!" she teased.
The uncle walked up to them and looked squarely at the aunt.
"They want the children to come home," he said grimly. "The judge is ill."
Nita stopped with a jolt. She knew instinctively-her daddy was dead.
The next hours were like a whirlwind. Nita wept in anguish, unaware of how she was being transported across the country to her parent's home. Her uncle and aunt tried to walk her up the drive, but her legs refused to function. She could see the big double gates swing open; she could see the many cars in the driveway; she could see that all the lights were on in the house, but she couldn't face any of it. She threw herself into her mother's arms.
"Mama! Why did God let this happen to us?" Her mother was silent in her own sorrow.
Nita was shattered. She cried out for her daddy in her sleep for several nights. She stumbled numbly through the funeral, as her brother Ted stood beside the casket like a block of wood, showing no emotion. Her mother wept constantly and repeated, "Our God could never make a mistake; our God never makes a mistake."
As Nita gained some control in the weeks and months that followed, a taut bitterness drew across her heart. "Daddy's gone to be with Jesus," people told her as they consoled the family. But Nita just sneered inside at the meannness of anyone - Jesus included - wo would claim to love her and still take her daddy away. Her family's status meant nothing to her; she had never been impressed by wealth. The comforts of life were conveniences to her, and nothing more. Nothing compared to the love she felt for that man.
Now he was snatched away.
Life changed in dozens of minute ways, all of which added up to grief for Nita. Now her mother walked into the bedroom each morning at six to say, "Time for prayers." Daddy had always sneaked in or hopped in or bounded in. And he always dug up all the bedsheets and blankets and searched for her tiny toes, wiggling them and ho-hoing as Nita giggled. And he always carried her down to the den for prayers.
There were no more hunting trips. Nita always rode on her father's shoulders, carrying the gun, until he spotted the target. He taught her to shoot. Every game she knew, she had learned from him. He was the only person she shared her most precious secrets with.
Now it had all soured. When she heard "God is love," she rankled. It was a ridiculous idea to her. She saw the phrase painted on the wall of a Pentecostal church, and she felt herself flooding with animosity. Her mother took to quoting Romans 8:28, "All things work together for good to them that love God," and Nita grew annoyed by the obvious blasphemy of it. She was alone in the world, and she decided to fight back with bare fists.
To get back at God, Nita began a campaign of deliberate disobedience. When her mother advised her to study, she neglected her studies. Although her mother paid fifteen dollars an hour for tuition, Nita skipped classes to go to the movies. When she could escape, she ditched church services. She poured herself instead into her sports. If she had a fever and her Mother sent her to bed, she waited until her back was turned and then grabbed the tennis racket and took off to rejoin her crowd of rowdies. And she would stay out as late as she liked, thank you.
Her mother was suffering too, since the judge's death, but Nita had no idea. Now, with Nita rebelling in this way, her mother's heart was shattered. Still, she stood her ground in a quiet way, never forcing decisions on her daughter, only advising as gently as she could. Nita refused it all, and went her own way for three years.
But behind her locked bedroom door, Nita's tough exterior gave way to tears of weakness. She was confused. She did not know how to cope without the foundation her father had provided. And she did not know what to do with the horrible empty longing for peace that she felt every day of her life - a longing she had never revealed to anyone.
Her parents had given her a Bible several years earlier, and now Nita began to read it - suspiciously at first. She noticed Psalm 68:5: "A father of the fatherless, and a judge of the widows, is God in his holy habitation." The description rang strangely true to her.
She began attending various churches in Colombo: Catholic, Presbyterian, Episcopalian, Methodist, Lutheran, Baptist and even Pentecostal. But in every place she found something to sneer at: a misquoted Scripture, an undignified worship format, whatever.
One night, Nita was restless and unable to sleep - unusual for her. She jumped out of bed and decided to raid the refrigerator. She had just stuffed her mouth with good English candy when she heard groaning in another part of the house. She walked toward it and came to her mother's room. The door was ajar, so she stuck her foot in, then her head.
The clock on the dresser read 2:10. Her mother was kneeling at her bedside, her face turned upward, tears drenching her face.
"Lord, I don't ask for fame," she cried. "I don't ask for wealth. I just ask that my children will turn their lives over to you, and live for you all the days of their lives. Please save Nita."
Nita's stony sixteen-year-old heart began an inexorable melting. She tiptoed back to her room, the chocolate having gone tasteless in her mouth.
But the Holy Spirit was quietly at work from the outside as well. A group of Pentecostal young people kept pestering Nita to attend one of their monthly youth parties. She always said yes and then failed to show up. Pentecostals were not her cup of Anglican tea. This loudmouthed hallelujah shouting was a bit barbarian as far as she was concerned. Nita preferred dignified worship.
The invitations kept coming, though, and finally Nita resolved to go just once to get the pests off her back. She was surprised to find it a pleasant evening after all. They served cookies and cake at someone's home and showed a movie about a drug addict getting his life straightened out. They sang choruses and prayed - which seemed a little pious to Nita - but all in all they were quite a jolly group and she enjoyed herself.
The love she felt in the presence of Christian young people finally snared her completely. The classic verse of Scripture, John 3:16, hit home one day without warning. Suddenly Nita realized that God loved her enough to give up His own precious Son ...
She thought back to her own father's love, and through that comparison she began to realize the magnificence of the Heavenly Father's love. Shaken, thrilled, and filled with awe, Nita determined to take hold of this Heavenly Father and never let go. She soon settled into the Pentecostal church that her new friends attended, and within the year she was gloriously filled with the Holy Spirit and baptized in water.
"Father, even if it costs me my last drop of blood," Nita vowed on November 16, 1968, "I will live my life for you.”
It was a solemn covenant, but as a busy, enthusiastic Christian, Nita soon forgot all about it. God, however, had placed it on file. It was best that Nita could not see ahead eight years, to the day she would lie scared and helpless in a hospital bed, when her Heavenly Father would call up that old covenant again.
Nita roused herself from her memories.
That was all so long ago. She was strong and vibrant then, and she had taken it all so lightly. Now she was a dying cripple cut down senselessly by some strange quirk of fate. It would almost be better to die. But death too seemed paralysed. She was in some strange time warp. Day folded into dreary day and the only thing she really knew was that she was sliding inch by inch into some horrible death - waiting, just waiting.
7
IN THE PIT
Her digestive system was next to go. She had never suffered from constipation in her life. The slightest spicy recipe could always trigger her digestive process, but now the functions ceased, and gashing abdominal cramps began. Four ounces of liquid paraffin brought no results. Seven laxatives lay in her stomach like rocks.
The paralysis had reached her intestines. Menstruation had stopped - her last vestige of womanhood - reminding her that she was now nothing but a lump of cells that refused to work and had slipped into some crazy Rip Van Winkle trance. She was no longer an athlete, a student, or even a woman. Paranoia began to settle in. Nita pored through medical texts and quizzed her doctor-friends on the sly. She could tell that her family was telling her less and less, and she was driven wild to know more. What she read terrified her, but still she had to know.
Convinced that Shan and his orthopaedic boys could do no more for her, Nita demanded to be moved to neurology. The red tape seemed to take forever, and when the paperwork finally did come through it was early one evening, after her family and other visitors had left. All the hospital's specialists left at four each afternoon, so there was no staff to introduce the new patient in the customary manner. Nita was wheeled into Ward 46 alone.
It was a pit.
Ward 46, the neurology ward, doubled as the emergency ward at Colombo General. Critical cases were admitted here, then transferred to other parts of the building. The twenty-bed ward always had about thirtyfive people in it, with patients lying in every crack of space, even along the outer corridor under a verandah! The concept of privacy was laughable, even with the bamboo mat that rolled down from above to serve as curtains between beds. The walls stopped short of the ceiling, and crows were common visitors in the rafters. Flies buzzed and lighted everywhere.
The ward nurse had just come on duty when Nita arrived. She had no idea who this girl was, or where to put her, and had not received instructions to move any other patient out into the corridor, and leave the new one inside. So Nita ended up in the corridor, not far from the toilet. The nurse went about her work, trying to care for all the patients at once.
Nita's senses were already thoroughly assaulted; her emotions were stretched to snapping point, and the scene overwhelmed her.
Visitors customarily used the other side of the corridor wall for spitting. Nita was not in a position to see this, but she recoiled in horror every time she heard it. Bloody emergencies were carted in and out at regular intervals and doctors, nurses and visitors squeezed through the crowded ward incessantly. The horrible trolley came around. Nita's private attendant squirmed and pleaded; because of the continuing kidney infection, she was to keep her patient on schedule. But the trolley was filthy, the bedpans on it were grimy, and Nita refused to empty her bladder.
Adjacent to Nita's bed was another holding an eightyfive-year-old woman, who was suffering from dysentery, and who was often completely delirious. The old woman began throwing her stained, filthy bedclothes out of her bed, and they were landing dangerously close to Nita's feet. Nita, terrified, could not even draw up her legs to avoid the missiles of human excrement.
The flushing of the nearby toilet made Nita nervous and she couldn't stop listening to the soft constant pings as flies ran into the tall metal locker next to her bed. The sound made her flesh crawl. She finally drew herself, as best she could, into a distant corner of her bed and pulled the sheet completely over her head to shut out all the filth. Her mind was racing furiously, her head throbbing and pounding. She squeezed her eyes shut and gritted her teeth, trying desperately to separate herself from the horrors of Ward 46.
Meanwhile, her visitors continued to show up at old Ward 3 and were being redirected to 46. Each of them came to the new location, but no one could see Nita in the outer corridor. Each one in succession left the hospital, puzzled. In her most horrible private hell, Nita was all alone. There was a terrible irony of the evening. The young man who had led her to the Lord arrived with some friends. They had searched all over and finally found her. Nita was fuming.
"Go get my mother," she said sharply.
They left, but Mrs. Edwards failed to show up. She felt a growing terror. Had her own mother turned? Was she so horribly obnoxious now that even her own mother could not stand to see her any longer? Night fell slowly, and finally the ward's main lights were shut off. Hours passed and Nita shivered under her covers.
After a little while, when all was quiet, Nita slowly pulled the sheet away from her head. She gasped. Above her was a grotesque deformed face, gaping at her, slobbering crazily in a toothless grin. She learned later that she, a neurotic patient in the next bed, had climbed over the metal locker to see what the new girl looked like. Nita choked back a scream and pulled the covers again over her face.
"Go away," she groaned anxiously from under her cover. Then she looked again, and the ugly old face was still there--she just kept staring. Normally Nita would not have reacted to a deformity, but now her nerves were jagged and she could not absorb any more.
An attendant came hurrying back from supper to pull the crazy woman back into her own bed. Nita shivered and closed her eyes again.
How much more can I take? she thought. She had to get out of this human junkyard. She would rather be dead than stay here.
The neurological specialist arrived with his staff early in the morning. Nita was already awake. In the morning light her terror had turned to fury. She heard the doctor talking but did not pull the sheet away from her face. Suddenly it was stripped off, and the surprised doctor was looking down at her. He had expected to see a corpse, not Nita.
"What are you doing here?" he cried, not waiting for an answer. He wheeled on his staff. "Why did you put her out here?" he demanded.
They scurried into action, moved another patient out of the room, cleaned the area, and wheeled Nita in.
The doctor checked her output of fluid. There had been none. He threw back the bedsheet, to find Nita's abdomen looking like a small igloo. A bedpan was called for - sterilized at Nita's insistence - but her system refused to function. The delay had caused complications. The doctor ordered an ice bath but it produced no change. Finally she was hooked up to a catheter.
Angry and aching, she watched a crow take position on a rafter just above her head and proceed to drop on her. It was the crowning blow for the daughter of the late Judge Edwards!
She had reached the limit of her calm. When her mother arrived later, Nita's months of bottled frustration finally exploded forth. She attacked from the moment her mother walked in.
"You don't care! Where were you last night? I spent the night in the corridor! You leave me to rot in this stinking place!" The tirade went on.
Mrs. Edwards was shocked. A relative, Nita's uncle, had died yesterday, and she had raced to attend the funeral. She had sent a message to her daughter but Nita hadn't received it. Neither had the boys who carried Nita's terse message the night before been able to locate Mrs. Edwards.
Nita's mother had visited her twice every day for more than six months. She had thought that one evening without her would make little difference, and she knew there were several friends planning to visit. She also thought the new ward would be as acceptable as the last, and she knew the private attendant would be on hand.
But she had not counted on Ward 46!
"You are moving me out of this place today," Nita commanded. "I want a private ward."
Visibly upset, Mrs. Edwards walked directly to the front office and filled out the transfer papers. But she returned with bad news. The private ward was being repainted, and Nita could not move in for another twentyfour hours.
Nita sighed, grim-faced. One more night! Well, it couldn't be as bad as the night before had been. But she was wrong. It was a more horrible ordeal than that of the night before - a strange dance of death.
During the day a nineteen-year old girl was wheeled into the place next to Nita. She was a leukemia victim, the daughter of an undertaker. She had gone home for the weekend but came back critically ill. Through the curtain Nita could hear the commotion around her bed. She kept asking the nurse what was happening, but they told her nothing. Eventually the commotion ended, but the curtain remained down. Nita suspected her wardmate was dead.
Night fell again on Ward 46, and the room grew quiet except for the intermittent groanings of its inhabitants. The private attendant noticed tiny bedbugs crawling on Nita's legs and began picking them off, trying to be casual about it. She knew her mistress would be horrified. Nita noticed - and grew nauseous. She could not even feel the bites, and yet the filthy creatures were growing fat on her blood. Her spirits sank to a new low.
Soon an aide came into the ward and wheeled one of the patients out. There was a sheet over the entire body. Nita shivered and thought of the body that still lay next to her bed. When would they remove that one?
Suddenly the ward exploded into action. Lights flashed on and nurses began shouting and scurrying. A stomach pump was rushed in. A woman had swallowed pesticide, trying to take her life, and was wheeled into the room of broken bones. Doctors and nurses worked her over noisily, until she could vomit on her own - which she proceeded to do throughout the night.
Again Nita felt anger stirring within her. Here, all around, were people desperate to stay alive, and this cowardly woman creates chaos trying to kill herself!
Once more the ward settled down, but before long the night nurse had drawn the sheet over another patient's face. Nita watched nervously as the covered corpse was wheeled past her. She tried to relax, but her heart was beating much too fast for that. As she stared aimlessly around the dark room, the night nurse covered another fresh corpse and signalled for the aide to fetch it.
Nita's heart pounded harder.
Am I next in line? she asked herself frantically. Will they pull the sheet over my face and wheel me away and dump me in the mortuary with the rest of the corpses?
She had never been exposed to death. She could recall that once her father pulled the car to the side of the road when a funeral passed by. That was all. Her father's corpse was too familiar to qualify as an object of death; she had kissed him, in fact, at the funeral. But now she felt the fear of death taking hold of her. As each new body was removed, she could see death's steady advance.
Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death . . . She had learned the verse as a child. Now Nita's mind began to reel with it. She was lying in a death station, waiting for her number to be called.
.. I will fear no evil: for thou art with me.
It was as if the undertaker were pacing the hall outside her door, waiting impatiently for her. Any breath could be her last. What would become of her?
She breathed deeper, quoting the psalm over and over, but her head kept spinning. The room began a slow, uneven whirl, and through the sickening motion Nita watched yet another whitesheeted corpse slipping toward the exit.
Will I meet God this night? she found herself wondering. Am I ready to present myself to the Almighty?
The room spun faster and faster, till it was nothing but a pearly blur; and against the blur she began to see the scenes of her life, flashing in rapid succession ... every wasted dollar, every convenient lie, every cherished happiness, every lost friend. She saw her daddy, grinning and joking ... her mother offering such strength ... her brother and sister in good and bad ... She saw the rebellious years all over again, incident by painful incident, played out on the movie screen of her memory. She tried to look away, but the movie stayed in front of her eyes. She could hear her pulse in her ears, growing louder by the minute, till she thought her eardrums would burst. And still the memories continued rolling.
Deep into the night, far into the darkness of early morning, the pictures kept flashing before her, until finally they faded. Nita was devastated. She had never confronted much of her past. She had submerged most of it.
In the waking light of morning, against a cheerier backdrop of singing birds and a pleasant breeze, Nita's eyes ran down the lines of Isaiah 43:18, "Remember ye not the former things, neither consider the things of old."
Suddenly she heard weeping from the vicinity of the next bed. The mother of the nineteen-year-old leukemia victim had arrived just as a nurse was yanking the oxygen equipment carelessly off the girl. She had also died long before in the night, like the others, but someone had failed to advise the family.
"Behold, I will do a new thing," Nita read in the following lines. "Now it shall spring forth; shall ye not know it?"
She listened as the body was covered and dumped over onto the death trolley, accompanied by the sobs of a sorrowing mother. Nita thought of her many sins, all dredged up again last night, and how she deserved to be on that trolley. But the Word of God told her differently.
"I, even I, am he that blotteth out thy transgressions for mine own sake, and will not remember thy sins."
Nita felt the soothing ointment of Scripture enveloping her spirit, and she resolved once again to give her life wholly to God.
But the life she was offering to God today was not the same life she had known. Now she began to realize that these memories - the pains and passions of her past - were the sum of her life as a normal girl. There would be no more of them. Her crippled body afforded her no more of that former carefree existence.
From now on, it was the bed, the ward, and - someday, she knew, the grave. But her life, or what was left of it, was God's. It wasn't much, but it was all she had left.
8
WINDOW ON THE WORLD
When she began choking on her food, Nita's diet was reduced to broth, juice and pudding. She had always loved to eat, but an electromyograph (EMG) showed the paralysis was still advancing upward, now overtaking her swallowing mechanism. A low-grade fever set in. Then, as she watched it helplessly her left hand began to grow cold. Another EMG confirmed that her hand was also paralysed.
Nita fought off the overwhelming misery by putting her right hand to constant use. She insisted on combing her own hair, brushing her teeth, buttoning and unbuttoning her shirt. She read the Word with a voracious appetite, propping the Bible on her stomach and turning the pages with her right hand. Her exterior was cheerful and visitors found her to be talkative and jovial. She never expressed her fear to anyone, but inside, the fear was very cold and very real.
Nita's room mate in her new ward was a little old lady who was dying of rectal cancer. Nita watched her wasting away and found herself wondering. Are we under the same cloud of death? Each day the question seemed to loom larger in front of her.
Her cold left hand became deathly pale, and soon she could not move it at all. The wasted muscles began shrinking, and the hand slowly curled up.
The physical therapists still paraded in and out, going through their assorted charades, twisting and squeezing and flexing the numb limbs. Nita cross-examined each of them, searching for clues about her future. They all said the same meaningless, "You'll be all right" - except one. Dr. Roy was a devout Roman Catholic, a father of children who were similar to Nita in age and personality. Watching Nita deteriorate was hard for him. Doctor and patient were fond of each other; they talked comfortably, and Roy never expressed his sense of sorrow or mourning. But neither would he lie to Nita, and when she asked about her future, he always had to say he wasn't sure. She knew he was doing his utmost for her. But she could see his eyes cloud up, and she knew from his face that she was dying piece by piece.
Her sensitivity was vanishing fast. From somewhere along her rib cage downward, she had lost all feeling. When the nurses washed and powdered her, they rubbed cream into her skin. She didn't feel a thing. Each day the paralysis crawled a little further, creeping up her trunk to her shoulders.
Her right hand, still functioning, grew weaker by the day, until it became a chore for Nita to flip the switch on her stereo or pick up her Bible. The attendant's call button was just under her right arm so that when she felt like reading she could push the button and have the attendant put a pillow on her chest, then place on top of that a cleverly designed book stand her cousin had shipped in from England. On that would be placed her Bible.
Little problems grew big as the paralysis increasingly complicated Nita's life. There was an ancient two-bladed fan in the ceiling over the bed. It was worthless, so her family brought in two new fans, one for either end of her bed. Invariably the breeze would flip the page over before Nita had finished reading it, and she would either have to skip ahead arbitrarily or begin the process all over again by pressing the call button and summoning the attendant for help.
But Nita clung tenaciously to the Scriptures. It was a far cry from her days at the university in India, when she read a few verses out of duty every morning before jogging off on her usual four-and-a-half-mile trek. Jogging now was nothing but a frustrating memory - now, she was literally feeding on the Word, reading and rereading Psalms, Isaiah, Jeremiah ...
And visitors continued streaming in and out. Nita was never without attention and affection. On her birthday, as she struggled to keep her mind off her father's death, her room had been steadily engulfed in flowers. First they covered the night stand, then the locker, then the edge of the bed. Finally another table was pulled up alongside the bed, and when it was filled, a second table was brought in and filled. At the end of the day, when everyone had gone, Nita folded her hands, inhaled the fragrant air and said to herself, "This is what I'll look like when I die."
One of her favourite visitors was Father Shirley Ferdinando, a forty-year-old Catholic priest who served the hospital as chaplain. Judge Edwards had strictly taught his children to respect anyone, Catholic or Protestant, who served the Lord. The judge had served as legal advisor to the Roman Catholic priests, and they were often to be found in the Edwards' home, rocking little Nita on their knees. At that time, her parents had a running argument about Seventh Day Adventists: Mrs. Edwards thought they were a cult and should be avoided, but the judge declared that anyone coming in the name of the Lord should be welcome in their home and treated with respect.
When Father Shirley walked by on Nita's first night in the hospital, she had greeted him, partly out of respect for his position and partly out of loneliness. She was, after all, an alien, never having spent time in any hospital before, and having been out of Sri Lanka for the past several years. Each day as the priest came through to serve communion to the Catholic patients he stopped to chat with Nita. With Shirley's warm sense of humour, they soon became fast friends.
"Hey, how come you pray for them every day," Nita chided him lightly one morning, "but you never pray for me? Come on, pray for me too!"
Shirley blinked in surprise, then closed his eyes and began to pray. Praying for his new friend became part of his daily pattern. The friendship grew stronger. As he met each member of Nita's family, as he heard the pieces of her story, as he learned that her birthday was the anniversary of the judge's death, he was drawn more and more into the circle of her tragic new life.
The chief neurophysician, J. B. Pieris, disliked Father Shirley. Pieris was a Buddhist, fervently anti-Christian, and quick to run the priest out of Nita's room whenever he noticed them together. This girl had entirely too many people praying for her, Pieris grumbled to the staff. Nuns, relatives, now this priest... If Shirley was going to spend so much time with her, the physician sneered, Nita Edwards might as well be transferred to a church.
But it was Father Shirley who gave Nita a window on the outside world.
She had stared for so many hours into the ceiling that she had counted and memorized every slat and bolt. Dr. Shan had long ago confiscated her collection of psychology texts - "Bad for your eyes," he had insisted - and dumped them in the bin. Perhaps this was an act of revenge for the professional grief Nita had brought him. With no television on the island, and having absorbed her limit of varied other reading materials, Nita's mind had finally bogged down. When she was alone, a million thoughts crowded each other for attention, but she could concentrate on none of them. Only visitors set her free. "Hey, Shirley, guess how many bolts there are in that
ceiling," Nita offered playfully one day.
The priest gaped skyward with his usual active sense of humour. But the girl's situation hit home with him in that moment, and he looked around the room for some way to cut her loose from her prison.
There was a beautiful wooden dressing table against the wall, with a wood-framed oval mirror attached. Shirley leaned into it and pushed it toward Nita's bed.
"What are you doing?" Nita exclaimed, as she heard the noise.
"I'm going to let you see what's going on outside these four walls."
The considerate priest pushed the dressing table until it sat at an angle to the bed, then tilted the mirror down by inches until she could look into the mirror and see out of the window.
It was only a portion of the hospital parking lot - but it was like the Garden of Eden to Nita. Here for the first time in months was a window on the world outside, a new sight on which her weary eyes could feast. And an everchanging scene!
Soon her family and friends had found the magic spot on the parking lot, and they began parking there when they could, or walking by and waving on their way in to see her. On their way out, too, everyone stopped to wave good-bye. Nita was unable to raise her hand enough to wave back, but, if she gave a big smile they could tell she had seen them.
The physical decay continued, unwilling to be arrested. Week after week the functions of her body broke down, her systems dissembled themselves. Nita's mother, and her family and friends, watched helplessly. Breathing became a tougher task every day, until finally her diaphragm collapsed, another victim of the ghastly paralysis. She began waking at odd hours, choking and gasping for a simple breath. Respiratory emergencies struck with such alarming frequency that an oxygen unit was finally left in her room. To keep her once-athletic lungs from collapsing, she was propped up on a bedrest with ten pillows.
Tubes were poked into Nita's wasting veins, up her nostrils, and down her throat. The constant smell of blood made her sick. She came to dread looking toward the door, for she could see the approach of the laboratory technicians - "the mosquitos," she called them - who came to draw blood samples from her limp arms every day.
There were endless X-rays, endless tests. At a given hour every afternoon she was wheeled down the hall for electrotherapy. There, technicians hooked her up to electrodes and sent jarring bolts of electricity through her body. She arched and jumped with every jolt, but after the session her limbs were always as dead as ever. Here rich-coloured skin faded to grocery-bag brown. Her eyes sank deeper and deeper into her skull. As each new organ failed, the pain increased. In tragic irony, the numbness on her exterior was matched inch-for-inch by the physical agony internally. Medication accomplished little.
She took comfort in the Word. Isaiah 43:2 reassured her:
"When thou passest through the waters, I will be with thee; and through the rivers, they shall not overflow thee: when thou walkest through the fire, thou shalt not be burned; neither shall the flame kindle upon thee."
Still, the paralysis crept upward.
The real nightmare had not yet begun.
The miracle was nowhere in sight.
9
THE EIGHTH FACE
... And also upon the servants
and upon the handmaids in those days
will I pour out my spirit.
Joel 2:29
Nita was in no mood for company. Another in the endless series of tests had just been completed - a lumbar puncture, which was very painful - and furthermore the nurse had accidentally cut her with a surgical knife. After patching the wound they had wheeled Nita into radiology for another in the endless series of scannings, and then trolleyed her back to her ward. It was always awkward, trundling her limp body from the rolling cart back into her bed, but today the aides had struggled more than usual, and had bumped her spine on the railing. Nita felt like crying - in fact, loudly, - but she still refused to give in to it.
She lay sulking in the bed, a bag of bones, praying, "Why me, God?" and angrily holding back the tears, when the husband of another relative walked in with Colton Wickramaratne. For a long time he had wanted Colton, his pastor, to pray for Nita.
Nita made every effort to be pleasant, as always, as they were introduced, but she was not disposed toward socializing at the moment. She was still mad at God. She answered the preacher's questions, smiled sweetly, and closed her eyes as he prayed. As he left she said, "Thank you for coming," but she really meant, "Thank you for going."
As a matter of courtesy Colton returned once a week. He normally did the same for anyone in the hospital. He prayed for this young person's healing, and shared the Word with her. Occasionally he would drop by twice in one week, but Nita was never more, or less enthusiastic than before. She had scores of visitors, and as her condition deteriorated she tired easily and they wore her out faster.
She said she was Spirit-filled, but Colton wondered about that. She never prayed aloud with him, never said hallelujah, never responded with much more than a nod or a pleasantry. Colton had prayed for hundreds in his lifetime; he had seen cancers cured, heart problems solved, and even more dramatic healings of life and limb. But with Nita, he felt he was getting nowhere. At times Nita would grow impatient with his childlike faith. Indeed, she could see that none of his faith-talk was slowing the decay of her body, so she analysed his statements, piece by piece, challenging him to answer her scepticism. Colton grew impatient too. This wasn't just spare time he was spending, after all! He was a busy man. His church was in a big building programme. He had dozens of others to visit and counsel, and the hospital was a good distance from the church.
Colton was always pleasant and polite - so was Nita - but each day as he left, he simmered a little hotter. He could hardly understand her Episcopal decorum since he himself worshipped passionately in the typical freewheeling Pentecostal style. And Nita, after ten nerveracking, exhausting months in the limbo of paralysis, was not inclined to humour any preacher's peculiar mood swings. Their plastic smiles hid a small hostility between them.
Finally one day, as he walked out of the ward, Colton decided he had dawdled long enough.
"Father, it's a waste of my time," he began in prayer as he walked down the hall. "She's a brick wall. I can't get through. She won't exercise a bit of faith. She will not even say hallelujah."
He walked out the door and toward his car. "It would be different if I had nothing else to do," he grumbled.
Colton got into the blue Volkswagen and slammed the door. "I'm not coming back to visit this girl any more. I've had enough of her. Who does she think she is?
He revved the engine angrily and turned around in the seat to back out of his space, but something unexpected caught his eye. In the window a few paces behind him, he saw a face - Nita's face.
She was looking into her mirror, smiling pleasantly, onto the parking lot as she always did when a visitor left. Colton stared hard. He knew it was Nita's face, but somehow it was different. He had seen it somewhere before. He slumped back into his seat and stopped the engine.
His mind drew back to that day, twenty years ago, when the eight faces appeared on his wall. He recalled each man's face, and he recalled meeting each of the seven.
But the final face, the woman ...
Colton's heart began thumping.
"God, either you're making a mistake, or I'm making a mistake.
"It can't be," he prayed nervously. "That's the face I saw in my vision!"
He sat stunned, and then arousing himself after a final look, he started the Volkswagen. He pulled the car into gear and dashed out of the parking lot, headed for the ocean. He raced to his usual place, his rocky hideaway, and cried out to his Father.
"That girl can't be the eighth face. That girl was only four years old in 1957 when I saw the vision!" he argued with God.
Deep into the night, Colton was still petitioning. "How can she have a role in the Asian revival? She doesn't accept anything on faith! She analyses everything."
Till two in the morning Colton sat in his hideaway wrestling with God. The sea crashed on the rocks nearby with insistent faithfulness.
"No God, she never even says hallelujah!"
But the conviction would not wash away with the tide,
the Lord's answer was simple and direct.
"She is the eighth face!"
Colton dragged himself home, in the early morning darkness. His wife Suzanne and their sons had come to the hospital searching for him, and Nita had told them he had left around six o'clock. They were afraid his car had crashed and that he was lying helplessly in some forsaken ditch. They had called the police and spent the night praying tearfully for his safe return. But Colton had been so shaken in his spirit he totally forgot his family's concern for his safety as he spent the hours in passionate prayer.
Colton came home a different person. His eyes were red, but gleaming. He had a new touch from God, a new hope for Nita's future - and the future of all Asia. By some miracle, this hopeless paralytic girl was going to be an instrument of revival in Asia. And now, finally he, Colton, could declare his vision! He could share the fascinating promise of God with each of the eight people.
The thrill of his discovery, however, soon wore off. Colton arrived at the hospital early the next morning with Suzanne and unloaded the entire story ... the collection of faces on the wall ... and the part that each of these eight people was assured of playing in the Asian revival.
Nita was unimpressed! She was dying of myelitis, a creeping paralysis that was destroying her limbs and vital organs, and, apart from that, she had always been cynical about visions and dreams and voices. The story Colton told her really bore no relevance to her.
"God is going to heal you," Colton insisted. "You're going to have an impact on all of Asia."
"You can't be sure of that," Nita replied coolly. "I come from a family of medical people. I know full well that my disease will eventually reach my heart and lungs, and I will die. But you're good to try and encourage me."
"I would never give you false hopes," Colton answered. "But I saw your face in the vision. You are going to live."
Nita shrugged. The preacher could believe whatever he liked. She couldn't stop him.
"I don't expect anything of you," Colton finally said before he left. "I just want you to know what I believe about you, and how I care about what happens to you. I believe God has a purpose for your life, and He wants Suzanne and me to stand with you."
Nita said nothing. He wasn't even her pastor and he was a little too emotional to please her. But if he wanted to believe, that was his business. He would learn soon enough that her case was hopeless.
Colton promised to return. He had to counsel a young couple across town that afternoon, but he would come back the next morning to pray with her.
God had a different agenda.
10
EMERGENCY CALL
He dropped Suzanne at the house and drove toward the couple's address. Colton had never met them, but he had promised to stop by their apartment and counsel them about their marriage problems.
"Turn around," the Lord said to him, in a strong inner impression as he drove. "Go back to the hospital."
"But why, Father?" Colton inquired. "I just came from there."
"Nita will need you."
Colton drove on. "Nita has electrotherapy every day at this hour. She won't even be there if I go back," he reasoned with himself.
The Lord kept prodding. Colton tried to ignore it. Maybe he was just imagining things. After all he had just come through a tremendous emotional experience in seeing the eighth face.
He arrived at the couple's apartment and knocked on the door.
"Go see Nita," the Lord insisted.
"Father, that's impossible," Colton protested as he waited for the door to open. "This young couple - I've just knocked on their door!"
"Go now."
"Father, I've promised to see them. They'll have tea and cakes lined up. It's Sri Lankan custom!"
"Go."
"Please come in," the woman said.
In the next split second Colton considered his options. He could ignore the silly notion of driving clear across the city to the hospital, and that would solve his problem. But no, he had dealt with the Lord too long; he knew better. If he said, "God spoke to me outside your door," these two people would probably think he was crazy and he would never get to counsel with them.
"I've just had an emergency call," he stammered. "I have to go to the hospital."
"Have some tea before you go," the young man offered as the preacher backed away.
"No time, even for tea," Colton blurted, picking up speed. "I'll see you another time," he called over his shoulder. "Make another appointment!"
He ran to the Volkswagen and sped away. Clear across Colombo he gripped the wheel. Something within him had begun to pulsate. But he couldn't tell what was going to happen. The traffic was terrible. Why couldn't all these people get out of the way? "Hurry, hurry," the inner voice said.
Colton screeched into the parking lot and bounded toward Nita's room. Suddenly he slowed to a walk. Nurses and aides were buzzing all around.
He relaxed, "Well, they must be taking good care of her."
But something about the scene, the faces, suddenly triggered panic in the little preacher. He pushed aside an attendant and peeked into the room. He was shocked. Nita lay crumpled at one edge of the bed, almost past struggling for breath. She had fallen from the bedrest as the nurses transferred her from the rolling cart. Now they were trying to pull her back up, but her gasping convulsions kept them from getting a solid grip on her.
Colton ran toward them. "Get the oxygen!" he shouted as he leaned over her taking charge over the surgical staff. "Call the doctor. Now!" he yelled.
"It's too late," the head nurse answered evenly, with the Buddhist reverence for death. "She is dying." For her, the only proper thing to do was to stand by and let the spirit depart from the body in peace.
Colton didn't answer her. Inside he began screaming. "No! Lord! You told me just last night this woman's witness will bring revival to Asia! I will not let her die!"
Colton pushed the nurses away and lifted up her convulsing body. He dumped her back on the bedrest and then held onto her, praying loudly, rebuking Satan, and crying out to God to spare her life.
The Buddhist attendants watched fearfully from the edges of the room. This strange man with the strange words must be a witchdoctor, for surely he was chanting over the sick one. They were afraid.
For over two hours Colton prayed. Nita's convulsions abated and she lay like a corpse, unconscious and unresponsive. But slowly, smoothly, she began the journey back. Deep in the recess of her spirit, she heard the distant prayers of a man who loved God. The words floated in and soothed her, like a healing balm, and she knew she was not alone.
She blinked slowly and tried to focus. Colton's hairy arms were extended down to her. He was rubbing her neck. His tie was loose and his blue short-sleeved shirt was drenched with sweat. His face and neck were shiny wet. And he was praying in a language she could not understand but somehow she knew it was very special to God.
She coughed weakly, and Colton opened his eyes, still massaging her neck muscles.
"Nita, this is Pastor Colton," he began gently. "We're with you. Jesus is here. Nita, God loves you. Jesus is here. You're coming through. Jesus is here ..."
A doctor came in and took Nita's pulse.
"She's all right," he said, trying to re-establish the official authority he and the staff had lost during the crisis.
"I know that," Colton said, and kept praying.
When the crisis had passed and Nita's mind was clear again, the miracle of Colton's return slowly dawned on her. From that moment she could not deny that God had His hand on her life, that He had sent this man to her as a friend and guide. Maybe, just maybe, there was an alternative to death.
But what did God want from her? She couldn't imagine.
Colton bounded like a hungry tiger into action. He began coming to the hospital at least twice a day, early in the morning and again in the afternoon, to visit with Nita; to pray with her; to talk through a Bible study with her and encourage her. Sometimes Suzanne accompanied him, and almost every day their young sons came along as well. Nita enjoyed the boys immensely as they climbed all over her, pinched her and tugged on her deformed toes and giggled and sang songs and told jokes and make funny faces, all trying to entertain her. Colton would drop by in the evenings too, as he visited other patients, and then sometimes later yet, when Nita's family had gone. On many evenings Colton was the last one to leave.
The cumulative hours of exposure to this strange little loving man and his sweet wife drew them into Nita's heart, and Nita into theirs. Week by week, she gradually opened up, chatting with Colton, talking about spiritual things, sometimes teasing him about his blind faith - but never again in the old combative way. Suzanne often brought homemade broth and fed it to her, easing some of the burden that Nita's mother had been carrying for so long. Nita grew deeply attached to the Wickramaratnes, and the attachment was mutual.
But Nita's body continued its undeniable breakdown. Her left hand had shrunk to half the size of her right, and her right hand lost its sensitivity now as well. She could hardly stand to look at her grotesque, hooked fingers. She was slowly curling up as her wasted muscles retracted inch by inch as the result of muscular atrophy. Her legs were strapped to metal calipers to keep them as straight as possible, but it was obvious the splints wouldn't work forever. She had to clear her throat constantly as the paralysis seeped into her neck. Headaches became more frequent, increasing in intensity until Nita thought her jaws would sink into each other. Colton spent hours standing next to her, rubbing her head to ease the pain which he could literally feel throbbing through her skull.
Colton and Suzanne often sat with Mrs. Edwards, praying in unity for their dear one, but nothing seemed to help. Nita refused to cry; refused to beg for help; refused to allow saccharin sympathy as her physical form steadily degenerated. Eventually her neck muscles gave way, and her head lurched helplessly to one side. Gasping respiratory attacks struck with frightful regularity. With each new crisis, nurses opened the oxygen cylinder and slapped the mask over Nita's face. One day the cylinder jammed and refused to open, as Nita choked. Colton prayed feverishly. Suzanne watched the nurses struggle with the cylinder as long as she could. Then she threw herself on the convulsing body and pressed her mouth against Nita's. She blew into the constricted throat again and again, until finally the seizure ended.
The end seemed to be coming every day, and the endless waiting took its toll on Nita's mother. Every day, for months, she had taken Nita's hand, looked heavenward, and prayed in simple, hopeful language for her daughter's healing. Over the months, that hand had warped and shrunk and twisted up, and still Mrs. Edwards' prayer was the same. Nita had rarely seen her cry. She had always been a source of strength and courage. But Mrs. Edwards went home every night and wept bitterly, agonizing over her child's condition. Every night, finally exhausted, she fell into a fitful sleep. Her appetite had vanished.
She had grown thin and, to those who had known her for long, gaunt. But Nita never knew the sorrow her mother was battling with.
The day came, however, when her mother's prayer of hope changed. In spite of the spurt of faith the little Pentecostal preacher had briefly generated in her, Mrs. Edwards could no longer hope for her daughter's health.
One night, thinking Nita was asleep and would not hear, she took the deformed little hand in her own and looked upward. She whispered, "Lord, I just can't take her suffering any longer. My girl hurts so much. Please take her home. Let her die!" The hot tears fell on Nita's crippled hand and she had heard it all.
But the Lord refused.
(CONTINUED IN NEXT POST)
Nita Edwards and Mark Buntain
WITH
Ron Hembree and Doug Brendel
CONTENTS
6 Fatherless
7 In the Pit
8 Window on the World
9 The Eighth Face
10 Emergency Call
____________________________
6
FATHERLESS
He had died the day after her thirteenth birthday. Now, as she neared her twenty-third birthday, almost six months after her arrival at the hospital, she thought more and more about him.
He had been one of Sri Lanka's most prominent faces, a man renowned and respected - and rich. He had found wealth in the chambers of the law, and he had built his estate carefully and wisely, as any crafty lawyer should. He was a judge in the city of Batticaloa, where Nita and her brother were reared. He was her father.
Nita loved her father as she would love no one else. He taught her to play tennis and to swim. She had been afraid of the water -she would only put her toes in - until the judge rescued her from everybody's taunting and teasing and lifted her up on his shoulders. Together they strode out into the Indian Ocean. There she was, four-year-old Nita, dangling her legs in the water and kicking and squealing with delight. She wasn't afraid any more; her daddy was the rock. At the end of that day they had to drag her out of the water because she was having too much fun to leave it.
The Edwards were fifth generation Episcopalians, proud of the Anglican Church, taught to be proper in every facet of life; they were clean, orderly, and educated people - nothing less would suffice. Social graces were high priorities, and the "dignity" of the human being was emphasized.
Nita was engrossed in her education at a proper school on Sri Lanka's west coast when her father had his first heart attack. He was a dynamo, always joking about dying in harness. "You never know," he used to say with a chuckle, "I might just pop off suddenly someday." And Mrs. Edwards would always return with, "Dad, don't say that. You were a fatherless child; I was a fatherless child. God will never let that happen to our children." But .. .
He was driving fifty miles to his chambers each day and the pace was wearing. At the end of a typical return trip, he collapsed on his bed, complaining of chest pains. At the hospital, his condition was labelled critical, and the Edwards family flew in all the best cardiovascular specialists they could. Two days later the judge suffered a massive, thumping heart attack. The specialists wrote him off. But he was still in harness - he refused to die.
For nearly three weeks he hung on. His wife sat by his side nearly around the clock, sponging him and shaving him herself, sometimes refusing even to break away for a shower. She gave him every injection, administered the bedpan, and stood watch at death's door.
Slowly he regained strength.
Very early one morning he began tossing restlessly.
His wife got up and walked toward him.
"What time is it?" he whispered hoarsely.
"Two."
The judge smiled, "It's our daughter's birthday, then."
In those wee hours, Judge Edwards dictated a cable:
"Loving birthday greetings to darling daughter. May God's sheltering wings protect you and guide you all along life. With love and kisses, Dad and Mother."
Usually Nita had a huge birthday party at the hostel in Colombo where she lived while she was in school. But today there was no party planned. Mrs. Edwards wanted to impress the children with the gravity of Father's condition. Nita's aunt, her mother's twin, was to come by the hostel at nine o'clock the next day to take her home to spend a day with her cousins - a substitute for the cancelled party.
At eight, Nita lined up with her mates for daily inspection. Her locker was in order, her shoes were shiny black, and as she stood erect, waiting for the matron, a slashing abdominal pain doubled her over. She dropped to her knees and clung to the bedpost, praying. The pain grew more intense every second for a full twenty minutes, and then finally it stopped as suddenly as it had begun.
Nita waited soberly in the foyer until her aunt came. They drove to her neighbourhood and walked toward the house. Coming to meet them was another uncle - not this aunt's husband, but the husband of her father's sister. He had come looking for Nita's aunt.
Nita smiled broadly at him, but he ignored her.
"Hm! The old boy doesn't even greet me!" she teased.
The uncle walked up to them and looked squarely at the aunt.
"They want the children to come home," he said grimly. "The judge is ill."
Nita stopped with a jolt. She knew instinctively-her daddy was dead.
The next hours were like a whirlwind. Nita wept in anguish, unaware of how she was being transported across the country to her parent's home. Her uncle and aunt tried to walk her up the drive, but her legs refused to function. She could see the big double gates swing open; she could see the many cars in the driveway; she could see that all the lights were on in the house, but she couldn't face any of it. She threw herself into her mother's arms.
"Mama! Why did God let this happen to us?" Her mother was silent in her own sorrow.
Nita was shattered. She cried out for her daddy in her sleep for several nights. She stumbled numbly through the funeral, as her brother Ted stood beside the casket like a block of wood, showing no emotion. Her mother wept constantly and repeated, "Our God could never make a mistake; our God never makes a mistake."
As Nita gained some control in the weeks and months that followed, a taut bitterness drew across her heart. "Daddy's gone to be with Jesus," people told her as they consoled the family. But Nita just sneered inside at the meannness of anyone - Jesus included - wo would claim to love her and still take her daddy away. Her family's status meant nothing to her; she had never been impressed by wealth. The comforts of life were conveniences to her, and nothing more. Nothing compared to the love she felt for that man.
Now he was snatched away.
Life changed in dozens of minute ways, all of which added up to grief for Nita. Now her mother walked into the bedroom each morning at six to say, "Time for prayers." Daddy had always sneaked in or hopped in or bounded in. And he always dug up all the bedsheets and blankets and searched for her tiny toes, wiggling them and ho-hoing as Nita giggled. And he always carried her down to the den for prayers.
There were no more hunting trips. Nita always rode on her father's shoulders, carrying the gun, until he spotted the target. He taught her to shoot. Every game she knew, she had learned from him. He was the only person she shared her most precious secrets with.
Now it had all soured. When she heard "God is love," she rankled. It was a ridiculous idea to her. She saw the phrase painted on the wall of a Pentecostal church, and she felt herself flooding with animosity. Her mother took to quoting Romans 8:28, "All things work together for good to them that love God," and Nita grew annoyed by the obvious blasphemy of it. She was alone in the world, and she decided to fight back with bare fists.
To get back at God, Nita began a campaign of deliberate disobedience. When her mother advised her to study, she neglected her studies. Although her mother paid fifteen dollars an hour for tuition, Nita skipped classes to go to the movies. When she could escape, she ditched church services. She poured herself instead into her sports. If she had a fever and her Mother sent her to bed, she waited until her back was turned and then grabbed the tennis racket and took off to rejoin her crowd of rowdies. And she would stay out as late as she liked, thank you.
Her mother was suffering too, since the judge's death, but Nita had no idea. Now, with Nita rebelling in this way, her mother's heart was shattered. Still, she stood her ground in a quiet way, never forcing decisions on her daughter, only advising as gently as she could. Nita refused it all, and went her own way for three years.
But behind her locked bedroom door, Nita's tough exterior gave way to tears of weakness. She was confused. She did not know how to cope without the foundation her father had provided. And she did not know what to do with the horrible empty longing for peace that she felt every day of her life - a longing she had never revealed to anyone.
Her parents had given her a Bible several years earlier, and now Nita began to read it - suspiciously at first. She noticed Psalm 68:5: "A father of the fatherless, and a judge of the widows, is God in his holy habitation." The description rang strangely true to her.
She began attending various churches in Colombo: Catholic, Presbyterian, Episcopalian, Methodist, Lutheran, Baptist and even Pentecostal. But in every place she found something to sneer at: a misquoted Scripture, an undignified worship format, whatever.
One night, Nita was restless and unable to sleep - unusual for her. She jumped out of bed and decided to raid the refrigerator. She had just stuffed her mouth with good English candy when she heard groaning in another part of the house. She walked toward it and came to her mother's room. The door was ajar, so she stuck her foot in, then her head.
The clock on the dresser read 2:10. Her mother was kneeling at her bedside, her face turned upward, tears drenching her face.
"Lord, I don't ask for fame," she cried. "I don't ask for wealth. I just ask that my children will turn their lives over to you, and live for you all the days of their lives. Please save Nita."
Nita's stony sixteen-year-old heart began an inexorable melting. She tiptoed back to her room, the chocolate having gone tasteless in her mouth.
But the Holy Spirit was quietly at work from the outside as well. A group of Pentecostal young people kept pestering Nita to attend one of their monthly youth parties. She always said yes and then failed to show up. Pentecostals were not her cup of Anglican tea. This loudmouthed hallelujah shouting was a bit barbarian as far as she was concerned. Nita preferred dignified worship.
The invitations kept coming, though, and finally Nita resolved to go just once to get the pests off her back. She was surprised to find it a pleasant evening after all. They served cookies and cake at someone's home and showed a movie about a drug addict getting his life straightened out. They sang choruses and prayed - which seemed a little pious to Nita - but all in all they were quite a jolly group and she enjoyed herself.
The love she felt in the presence of Christian young people finally snared her completely. The classic verse of Scripture, John 3:16, hit home one day without warning. Suddenly Nita realized that God loved her enough to give up His own precious Son ...
She thought back to her own father's love, and through that comparison she began to realize the magnificence of the Heavenly Father's love. Shaken, thrilled, and filled with awe, Nita determined to take hold of this Heavenly Father and never let go. She soon settled into the Pentecostal church that her new friends attended, and within the year she was gloriously filled with the Holy Spirit and baptized in water.
"Father, even if it costs me my last drop of blood," Nita vowed on November 16, 1968, "I will live my life for you.”
It was a solemn covenant, but as a busy, enthusiastic Christian, Nita soon forgot all about it. God, however, had placed it on file. It was best that Nita could not see ahead eight years, to the day she would lie scared and helpless in a hospital bed, when her Heavenly Father would call up that old covenant again.
Nita roused herself from her memories.
That was all so long ago. She was strong and vibrant then, and she had taken it all so lightly. Now she was a dying cripple cut down senselessly by some strange quirk of fate. It would almost be better to die. But death too seemed paralysed. She was in some strange time warp. Day folded into dreary day and the only thing she really knew was that she was sliding inch by inch into some horrible death - waiting, just waiting.
7
IN THE PIT
Her digestive system was next to go. She had never suffered from constipation in her life. The slightest spicy recipe could always trigger her digestive process, but now the functions ceased, and gashing abdominal cramps began. Four ounces of liquid paraffin brought no results. Seven laxatives lay in her stomach like rocks.
The paralysis had reached her intestines. Menstruation had stopped - her last vestige of womanhood - reminding her that she was now nothing but a lump of cells that refused to work and had slipped into some crazy Rip Van Winkle trance. She was no longer an athlete, a student, or even a woman. Paranoia began to settle in. Nita pored through medical texts and quizzed her doctor-friends on the sly. She could tell that her family was telling her less and less, and she was driven wild to know more. What she read terrified her, but still she had to know.
Convinced that Shan and his orthopaedic boys could do no more for her, Nita demanded to be moved to neurology. The red tape seemed to take forever, and when the paperwork finally did come through it was early one evening, after her family and other visitors had left. All the hospital's specialists left at four each afternoon, so there was no staff to introduce the new patient in the customary manner. Nita was wheeled into Ward 46 alone.
It was a pit.
Ward 46, the neurology ward, doubled as the emergency ward at Colombo General. Critical cases were admitted here, then transferred to other parts of the building. The twenty-bed ward always had about thirtyfive people in it, with patients lying in every crack of space, even along the outer corridor under a verandah! The concept of privacy was laughable, even with the bamboo mat that rolled down from above to serve as curtains between beds. The walls stopped short of the ceiling, and crows were common visitors in the rafters. Flies buzzed and lighted everywhere.
The ward nurse had just come on duty when Nita arrived. She had no idea who this girl was, or where to put her, and had not received instructions to move any other patient out into the corridor, and leave the new one inside. So Nita ended up in the corridor, not far from the toilet. The nurse went about her work, trying to care for all the patients at once.
Nita's senses were already thoroughly assaulted; her emotions were stretched to snapping point, and the scene overwhelmed her.
Visitors customarily used the other side of the corridor wall for spitting. Nita was not in a position to see this, but she recoiled in horror every time she heard it. Bloody emergencies were carted in and out at regular intervals and doctors, nurses and visitors squeezed through the crowded ward incessantly. The horrible trolley came around. Nita's private attendant squirmed and pleaded; because of the continuing kidney infection, she was to keep her patient on schedule. But the trolley was filthy, the bedpans on it were grimy, and Nita refused to empty her bladder.
Adjacent to Nita's bed was another holding an eightyfive-year-old woman, who was suffering from dysentery, and who was often completely delirious. The old woman began throwing her stained, filthy bedclothes out of her bed, and they were landing dangerously close to Nita's feet. Nita, terrified, could not even draw up her legs to avoid the missiles of human excrement.
The flushing of the nearby toilet made Nita nervous and she couldn't stop listening to the soft constant pings as flies ran into the tall metal locker next to her bed. The sound made her flesh crawl. She finally drew herself, as best she could, into a distant corner of her bed and pulled the sheet completely over her head to shut out all the filth. Her mind was racing furiously, her head throbbing and pounding. She squeezed her eyes shut and gritted her teeth, trying desperately to separate herself from the horrors of Ward 46.
Meanwhile, her visitors continued to show up at old Ward 3 and were being redirected to 46. Each of them came to the new location, but no one could see Nita in the outer corridor. Each one in succession left the hospital, puzzled. In her most horrible private hell, Nita was all alone. There was a terrible irony of the evening. The young man who had led her to the Lord arrived with some friends. They had searched all over and finally found her. Nita was fuming.
"Go get my mother," she said sharply.
They left, but Mrs. Edwards failed to show up. She felt a growing terror. Had her own mother turned? Was she so horribly obnoxious now that even her own mother could not stand to see her any longer? Night fell slowly, and finally the ward's main lights were shut off. Hours passed and Nita shivered under her covers.
After a little while, when all was quiet, Nita slowly pulled the sheet away from her head. She gasped. Above her was a grotesque deformed face, gaping at her, slobbering crazily in a toothless grin. She learned later that she, a neurotic patient in the next bed, had climbed over the metal locker to see what the new girl looked like. Nita choked back a scream and pulled the covers again over her face.
"Go away," she groaned anxiously from under her cover. Then she looked again, and the ugly old face was still there--she just kept staring. Normally Nita would not have reacted to a deformity, but now her nerves were jagged and she could not absorb any more.
An attendant came hurrying back from supper to pull the crazy woman back into her own bed. Nita shivered and closed her eyes again.
How much more can I take? she thought. She had to get out of this human junkyard. She would rather be dead than stay here.
The neurological specialist arrived with his staff early in the morning. Nita was already awake. In the morning light her terror had turned to fury. She heard the doctor talking but did not pull the sheet away from her face. Suddenly it was stripped off, and the surprised doctor was looking down at her. He had expected to see a corpse, not Nita.
"What are you doing here?" he cried, not waiting for an answer. He wheeled on his staff. "Why did you put her out here?" he demanded.
They scurried into action, moved another patient out of the room, cleaned the area, and wheeled Nita in.
The doctor checked her output of fluid. There had been none. He threw back the bedsheet, to find Nita's abdomen looking like a small igloo. A bedpan was called for - sterilized at Nita's insistence - but her system refused to function. The delay had caused complications. The doctor ordered an ice bath but it produced no change. Finally she was hooked up to a catheter.
Angry and aching, she watched a crow take position on a rafter just above her head and proceed to drop on her. It was the crowning blow for the daughter of the late Judge Edwards!
She had reached the limit of her calm. When her mother arrived later, Nita's months of bottled frustration finally exploded forth. She attacked from the moment her mother walked in.
"You don't care! Where were you last night? I spent the night in the corridor! You leave me to rot in this stinking place!" The tirade went on.
Mrs. Edwards was shocked. A relative, Nita's uncle, had died yesterday, and she had raced to attend the funeral. She had sent a message to her daughter but Nita hadn't received it. Neither had the boys who carried Nita's terse message the night before been able to locate Mrs. Edwards.
Nita's mother had visited her twice every day for more than six months. She had thought that one evening without her would make little difference, and she knew there were several friends planning to visit. She also thought the new ward would be as acceptable as the last, and she knew the private attendant would be on hand.
But she had not counted on Ward 46!
"You are moving me out of this place today," Nita commanded. "I want a private ward."
Visibly upset, Mrs. Edwards walked directly to the front office and filled out the transfer papers. But she returned with bad news. The private ward was being repainted, and Nita could not move in for another twentyfour hours.
Nita sighed, grim-faced. One more night! Well, it couldn't be as bad as the night before had been. But she was wrong. It was a more horrible ordeal than that of the night before - a strange dance of death.
During the day a nineteen-year old girl was wheeled into the place next to Nita. She was a leukemia victim, the daughter of an undertaker. She had gone home for the weekend but came back critically ill. Through the curtain Nita could hear the commotion around her bed. She kept asking the nurse what was happening, but they told her nothing. Eventually the commotion ended, but the curtain remained down. Nita suspected her wardmate was dead.
Night fell again on Ward 46, and the room grew quiet except for the intermittent groanings of its inhabitants. The private attendant noticed tiny bedbugs crawling on Nita's legs and began picking them off, trying to be casual about it. She knew her mistress would be horrified. Nita noticed - and grew nauseous. She could not even feel the bites, and yet the filthy creatures were growing fat on her blood. Her spirits sank to a new low.
Soon an aide came into the ward and wheeled one of the patients out. There was a sheet over the entire body. Nita shivered and thought of the body that still lay next to her bed. When would they remove that one?
Suddenly the ward exploded into action. Lights flashed on and nurses began shouting and scurrying. A stomach pump was rushed in. A woman had swallowed pesticide, trying to take her life, and was wheeled into the room of broken bones. Doctors and nurses worked her over noisily, until she could vomit on her own - which she proceeded to do throughout the night.
Again Nita felt anger stirring within her. Here, all around, were people desperate to stay alive, and this cowardly woman creates chaos trying to kill herself!
Once more the ward settled down, but before long the night nurse had drawn the sheet over another patient's face. Nita watched nervously as the covered corpse was wheeled past her. She tried to relax, but her heart was beating much too fast for that. As she stared aimlessly around the dark room, the night nurse covered another fresh corpse and signalled for the aide to fetch it.
Nita's heart pounded harder.
Am I next in line? she asked herself frantically. Will they pull the sheet over my face and wheel me away and dump me in the mortuary with the rest of the corpses?
She had never been exposed to death. She could recall that once her father pulled the car to the side of the road when a funeral passed by. That was all. Her father's corpse was too familiar to qualify as an object of death; she had kissed him, in fact, at the funeral. But now she felt the fear of death taking hold of her. As each new body was removed, she could see death's steady advance.
Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death . . . She had learned the verse as a child. Now Nita's mind began to reel with it. She was lying in a death station, waiting for her number to be called.
.. I will fear no evil: for thou art with me.
It was as if the undertaker were pacing the hall outside her door, waiting impatiently for her. Any breath could be her last. What would become of her?
She breathed deeper, quoting the psalm over and over, but her head kept spinning. The room began a slow, uneven whirl, and through the sickening motion Nita watched yet another whitesheeted corpse slipping toward the exit.
Will I meet God this night? she found herself wondering. Am I ready to present myself to the Almighty?
The room spun faster and faster, till it was nothing but a pearly blur; and against the blur she began to see the scenes of her life, flashing in rapid succession ... every wasted dollar, every convenient lie, every cherished happiness, every lost friend. She saw her daddy, grinning and joking ... her mother offering such strength ... her brother and sister in good and bad ... She saw the rebellious years all over again, incident by painful incident, played out on the movie screen of her memory. She tried to look away, but the movie stayed in front of her eyes. She could hear her pulse in her ears, growing louder by the minute, till she thought her eardrums would burst. And still the memories continued rolling.
Deep into the night, far into the darkness of early morning, the pictures kept flashing before her, until finally they faded. Nita was devastated. She had never confronted much of her past. She had submerged most of it.
In the waking light of morning, against a cheerier backdrop of singing birds and a pleasant breeze, Nita's eyes ran down the lines of Isaiah 43:18, "Remember ye not the former things, neither consider the things of old."
Suddenly she heard weeping from the vicinity of the next bed. The mother of the nineteen-year-old leukemia victim had arrived just as a nurse was yanking the oxygen equipment carelessly off the girl. She had also died long before in the night, like the others, but someone had failed to advise the family.
"Behold, I will do a new thing," Nita read in the following lines. "Now it shall spring forth; shall ye not know it?"
She listened as the body was covered and dumped over onto the death trolley, accompanied by the sobs of a sorrowing mother. Nita thought of her many sins, all dredged up again last night, and how she deserved to be on that trolley. But the Word of God told her differently.
"I, even I, am he that blotteth out thy transgressions for mine own sake, and will not remember thy sins."
Nita felt the soothing ointment of Scripture enveloping her spirit, and she resolved once again to give her life wholly to God.
But the life she was offering to God today was not the same life she had known. Now she began to realize that these memories - the pains and passions of her past - were the sum of her life as a normal girl. There would be no more of them. Her crippled body afforded her no more of that former carefree existence.
From now on, it was the bed, the ward, and - someday, she knew, the grave. But her life, or what was left of it, was God's. It wasn't much, but it was all she had left.
8
WINDOW ON THE WORLD
When she began choking on her food, Nita's diet was reduced to broth, juice and pudding. She had always loved to eat, but an electromyograph (EMG) showed the paralysis was still advancing upward, now overtaking her swallowing mechanism. A low-grade fever set in. Then, as she watched it helplessly her left hand began to grow cold. Another EMG confirmed that her hand was also paralysed.
Nita fought off the overwhelming misery by putting her right hand to constant use. She insisted on combing her own hair, brushing her teeth, buttoning and unbuttoning her shirt. She read the Word with a voracious appetite, propping the Bible on her stomach and turning the pages with her right hand. Her exterior was cheerful and visitors found her to be talkative and jovial. She never expressed her fear to anyone, but inside, the fear was very cold and very real.
Nita's room mate in her new ward was a little old lady who was dying of rectal cancer. Nita watched her wasting away and found herself wondering. Are we under the same cloud of death? Each day the question seemed to loom larger in front of her.
Her cold left hand became deathly pale, and soon she could not move it at all. The wasted muscles began shrinking, and the hand slowly curled up.
The physical therapists still paraded in and out, going through their assorted charades, twisting and squeezing and flexing the numb limbs. Nita cross-examined each of them, searching for clues about her future. They all said the same meaningless, "You'll be all right" - except one. Dr. Roy was a devout Roman Catholic, a father of children who were similar to Nita in age and personality. Watching Nita deteriorate was hard for him. Doctor and patient were fond of each other; they talked comfortably, and Roy never expressed his sense of sorrow or mourning. But neither would he lie to Nita, and when she asked about her future, he always had to say he wasn't sure. She knew he was doing his utmost for her. But she could see his eyes cloud up, and she knew from his face that she was dying piece by piece.
Her sensitivity was vanishing fast. From somewhere along her rib cage downward, she had lost all feeling. When the nurses washed and powdered her, they rubbed cream into her skin. She didn't feel a thing. Each day the paralysis crawled a little further, creeping up her trunk to her shoulders.
Her right hand, still functioning, grew weaker by the day, until it became a chore for Nita to flip the switch on her stereo or pick up her Bible. The attendant's call button was just under her right arm so that when she felt like reading she could push the button and have the attendant put a pillow on her chest, then place on top of that a cleverly designed book stand her cousin had shipped in from England. On that would be placed her Bible.
Little problems grew big as the paralysis increasingly complicated Nita's life. There was an ancient two-bladed fan in the ceiling over the bed. It was worthless, so her family brought in two new fans, one for either end of her bed. Invariably the breeze would flip the page over before Nita had finished reading it, and she would either have to skip ahead arbitrarily or begin the process all over again by pressing the call button and summoning the attendant for help.
But Nita clung tenaciously to the Scriptures. It was a far cry from her days at the university in India, when she read a few verses out of duty every morning before jogging off on her usual four-and-a-half-mile trek. Jogging now was nothing but a frustrating memory - now, she was literally feeding on the Word, reading and rereading Psalms, Isaiah, Jeremiah ...
And visitors continued streaming in and out. Nita was never without attention and affection. On her birthday, as she struggled to keep her mind off her father's death, her room had been steadily engulfed in flowers. First they covered the night stand, then the locker, then the edge of the bed. Finally another table was pulled up alongside the bed, and when it was filled, a second table was brought in and filled. At the end of the day, when everyone had gone, Nita folded her hands, inhaled the fragrant air and said to herself, "This is what I'll look like when I die."
One of her favourite visitors was Father Shirley Ferdinando, a forty-year-old Catholic priest who served the hospital as chaplain. Judge Edwards had strictly taught his children to respect anyone, Catholic or Protestant, who served the Lord. The judge had served as legal advisor to the Roman Catholic priests, and they were often to be found in the Edwards' home, rocking little Nita on their knees. At that time, her parents had a running argument about Seventh Day Adventists: Mrs. Edwards thought they were a cult and should be avoided, but the judge declared that anyone coming in the name of the Lord should be welcome in their home and treated with respect.
When Father Shirley walked by on Nita's first night in the hospital, she had greeted him, partly out of respect for his position and partly out of loneliness. She was, after all, an alien, never having spent time in any hospital before, and having been out of Sri Lanka for the past several years. Each day as the priest came through to serve communion to the Catholic patients he stopped to chat with Nita. With Shirley's warm sense of humour, they soon became fast friends.
"Hey, how come you pray for them every day," Nita chided him lightly one morning, "but you never pray for me? Come on, pray for me too!"
Shirley blinked in surprise, then closed his eyes and began to pray. Praying for his new friend became part of his daily pattern. The friendship grew stronger. As he met each member of Nita's family, as he heard the pieces of her story, as he learned that her birthday was the anniversary of the judge's death, he was drawn more and more into the circle of her tragic new life.
The chief neurophysician, J. B. Pieris, disliked Father Shirley. Pieris was a Buddhist, fervently anti-Christian, and quick to run the priest out of Nita's room whenever he noticed them together. This girl had entirely too many people praying for her, Pieris grumbled to the staff. Nuns, relatives, now this priest... If Shirley was going to spend so much time with her, the physician sneered, Nita Edwards might as well be transferred to a church.
But it was Father Shirley who gave Nita a window on the outside world.
She had stared for so many hours into the ceiling that she had counted and memorized every slat and bolt. Dr. Shan had long ago confiscated her collection of psychology texts - "Bad for your eyes," he had insisted - and dumped them in the bin. Perhaps this was an act of revenge for the professional grief Nita had brought him. With no television on the island, and having absorbed her limit of varied other reading materials, Nita's mind had finally bogged down. When she was alone, a million thoughts crowded each other for attention, but she could concentrate on none of them. Only visitors set her free. "Hey, Shirley, guess how many bolts there are in that
ceiling," Nita offered playfully one day.
The priest gaped skyward with his usual active sense of humour. But the girl's situation hit home with him in that moment, and he looked around the room for some way to cut her loose from her prison.
There was a beautiful wooden dressing table against the wall, with a wood-framed oval mirror attached. Shirley leaned into it and pushed it toward Nita's bed.
"What are you doing?" Nita exclaimed, as she heard the noise.
"I'm going to let you see what's going on outside these four walls."
The considerate priest pushed the dressing table until it sat at an angle to the bed, then tilted the mirror down by inches until she could look into the mirror and see out of the window.
It was only a portion of the hospital parking lot - but it was like the Garden of Eden to Nita. Here for the first time in months was a window on the world outside, a new sight on which her weary eyes could feast. And an everchanging scene!
Soon her family and friends had found the magic spot on the parking lot, and they began parking there when they could, or walking by and waving on their way in to see her. On their way out, too, everyone stopped to wave good-bye. Nita was unable to raise her hand enough to wave back, but, if she gave a big smile they could tell she had seen them.
The physical decay continued, unwilling to be arrested. Week after week the functions of her body broke down, her systems dissembled themselves. Nita's mother, and her family and friends, watched helplessly. Breathing became a tougher task every day, until finally her diaphragm collapsed, another victim of the ghastly paralysis. She began waking at odd hours, choking and gasping for a simple breath. Respiratory emergencies struck with such alarming frequency that an oxygen unit was finally left in her room. To keep her once-athletic lungs from collapsing, she was propped up on a bedrest with ten pillows.
Tubes were poked into Nita's wasting veins, up her nostrils, and down her throat. The constant smell of blood made her sick. She came to dread looking toward the door, for she could see the approach of the laboratory technicians - "the mosquitos," she called them - who came to draw blood samples from her limp arms every day.
There were endless X-rays, endless tests. At a given hour every afternoon she was wheeled down the hall for electrotherapy. There, technicians hooked her up to electrodes and sent jarring bolts of electricity through her body. She arched and jumped with every jolt, but after the session her limbs were always as dead as ever. Here rich-coloured skin faded to grocery-bag brown. Her eyes sank deeper and deeper into her skull. As each new organ failed, the pain increased. In tragic irony, the numbness on her exterior was matched inch-for-inch by the physical agony internally. Medication accomplished little.
She took comfort in the Word. Isaiah 43:2 reassured her:
"When thou passest through the waters, I will be with thee; and through the rivers, they shall not overflow thee: when thou walkest through the fire, thou shalt not be burned; neither shall the flame kindle upon thee."
Still, the paralysis crept upward.
The real nightmare had not yet begun.
The miracle was nowhere in sight.
9
THE EIGHTH FACE
... And also upon the servants
and upon the handmaids in those days
will I pour out my spirit.
Joel 2:29
Nita was in no mood for company. Another in the endless series of tests had just been completed - a lumbar puncture, which was very painful - and furthermore the nurse had accidentally cut her with a surgical knife. After patching the wound they had wheeled Nita into radiology for another in the endless series of scannings, and then trolleyed her back to her ward. It was always awkward, trundling her limp body from the rolling cart back into her bed, but today the aides had struggled more than usual, and had bumped her spine on the railing. Nita felt like crying - in fact, loudly, - but she still refused to give in to it.
She lay sulking in the bed, a bag of bones, praying, "Why me, God?" and angrily holding back the tears, when the husband of another relative walked in with Colton Wickramaratne. For a long time he had wanted Colton, his pastor, to pray for Nita.
Nita made every effort to be pleasant, as always, as they were introduced, but she was not disposed toward socializing at the moment. She was still mad at God. She answered the preacher's questions, smiled sweetly, and closed her eyes as he prayed. As he left she said, "Thank you for coming," but she really meant, "Thank you for going."
As a matter of courtesy Colton returned once a week. He normally did the same for anyone in the hospital. He prayed for this young person's healing, and shared the Word with her. Occasionally he would drop by twice in one week, but Nita was never more, or less enthusiastic than before. She had scores of visitors, and as her condition deteriorated she tired easily and they wore her out faster.
She said she was Spirit-filled, but Colton wondered about that. She never prayed aloud with him, never said hallelujah, never responded with much more than a nod or a pleasantry. Colton had prayed for hundreds in his lifetime; he had seen cancers cured, heart problems solved, and even more dramatic healings of life and limb. But with Nita, he felt he was getting nowhere. At times Nita would grow impatient with his childlike faith. Indeed, she could see that none of his faith-talk was slowing the decay of her body, so she analysed his statements, piece by piece, challenging him to answer her scepticism. Colton grew impatient too. This wasn't just spare time he was spending, after all! He was a busy man. His church was in a big building programme. He had dozens of others to visit and counsel, and the hospital was a good distance from the church.
Colton was always pleasant and polite - so was Nita - but each day as he left, he simmered a little hotter. He could hardly understand her Episcopal decorum since he himself worshipped passionately in the typical freewheeling Pentecostal style. And Nita, after ten nerveracking, exhausting months in the limbo of paralysis, was not inclined to humour any preacher's peculiar mood swings. Their plastic smiles hid a small hostility between them.
Finally one day, as he walked out of the ward, Colton decided he had dawdled long enough.
"Father, it's a waste of my time," he began in prayer as he walked down the hall. "She's a brick wall. I can't get through. She won't exercise a bit of faith. She will not even say hallelujah."
He walked out the door and toward his car. "It would be different if I had nothing else to do," he grumbled.
Colton got into the blue Volkswagen and slammed the door. "I'm not coming back to visit this girl any more. I've had enough of her. Who does she think she is?
He revved the engine angrily and turned around in the seat to back out of his space, but something unexpected caught his eye. In the window a few paces behind him, he saw a face - Nita's face.
She was looking into her mirror, smiling pleasantly, onto the parking lot as she always did when a visitor left. Colton stared hard. He knew it was Nita's face, but somehow it was different. He had seen it somewhere before. He slumped back into his seat and stopped the engine.
His mind drew back to that day, twenty years ago, when the eight faces appeared on his wall. He recalled each man's face, and he recalled meeting each of the seven.
But the final face, the woman ...
Colton's heart began thumping.
"God, either you're making a mistake, or I'm making a mistake.
"It can't be," he prayed nervously. "That's the face I saw in my vision!"
He sat stunned, and then arousing himself after a final look, he started the Volkswagen. He pulled the car into gear and dashed out of the parking lot, headed for the ocean. He raced to his usual place, his rocky hideaway, and cried out to his Father.
"That girl can't be the eighth face. That girl was only four years old in 1957 when I saw the vision!" he argued with God.
Deep into the night, Colton was still petitioning. "How can she have a role in the Asian revival? She doesn't accept anything on faith! She analyses everything."
Till two in the morning Colton sat in his hideaway wrestling with God. The sea crashed on the rocks nearby with insistent faithfulness.
"No God, she never even says hallelujah!"
But the conviction would not wash away with the tide,
the Lord's answer was simple and direct.
"She is the eighth face!"
Colton dragged himself home, in the early morning darkness. His wife Suzanne and their sons had come to the hospital searching for him, and Nita had told them he had left around six o'clock. They were afraid his car had crashed and that he was lying helplessly in some forsaken ditch. They had called the police and spent the night praying tearfully for his safe return. But Colton had been so shaken in his spirit he totally forgot his family's concern for his safety as he spent the hours in passionate prayer.
Colton came home a different person. His eyes were red, but gleaming. He had a new touch from God, a new hope for Nita's future - and the future of all Asia. By some miracle, this hopeless paralytic girl was going to be an instrument of revival in Asia. And now, finally he, Colton, could declare his vision! He could share the fascinating promise of God with each of the eight people.
The thrill of his discovery, however, soon wore off. Colton arrived at the hospital early the next morning with Suzanne and unloaded the entire story ... the collection of faces on the wall ... and the part that each of these eight people was assured of playing in the Asian revival.
Nita was unimpressed! She was dying of myelitis, a creeping paralysis that was destroying her limbs and vital organs, and, apart from that, she had always been cynical about visions and dreams and voices. The story Colton told her really bore no relevance to her.
"God is going to heal you," Colton insisted. "You're going to have an impact on all of Asia."
"You can't be sure of that," Nita replied coolly. "I come from a family of medical people. I know full well that my disease will eventually reach my heart and lungs, and I will die. But you're good to try and encourage me."
"I would never give you false hopes," Colton answered. "But I saw your face in the vision. You are going to live."
Nita shrugged. The preacher could believe whatever he liked. She couldn't stop him.
"I don't expect anything of you," Colton finally said before he left. "I just want you to know what I believe about you, and how I care about what happens to you. I believe God has a purpose for your life, and He wants Suzanne and me to stand with you."
Nita said nothing. He wasn't even her pastor and he was a little too emotional to please her. But if he wanted to believe, that was his business. He would learn soon enough that her case was hopeless.
Colton promised to return. He had to counsel a young couple across town that afternoon, but he would come back the next morning to pray with her.
God had a different agenda.
10
EMERGENCY CALL
He dropped Suzanne at the house and drove toward the couple's address. Colton had never met them, but he had promised to stop by their apartment and counsel them about their marriage problems.
"Turn around," the Lord said to him, in a strong inner impression as he drove. "Go back to the hospital."
"But why, Father?" Colton inquired. "I just came from there."
"Nita will need you."
Colton drove on. "Nita has electrotherapy every day at this hour. She won't even be there if I go back," he reasoned with himself.
The Lord kept prodding. Colton tried to ignore it. Maybe he was just imagining things. After all he had just come through a tremendous emotional experience in seeing the eighth face.
He arrived at the couple's apartment and knocked on the door.
"Go see Nita," the Lord insisted.
"Father, that's impossible," Colton protested as he waited for the door to open. "This young couple - I've just knocked on their door!"
"Go now."
"Father, I've promised to see them. They'll have tea and cakes lined up. It's Sri Lankan custom!"
"Go."
"Please come in," the woman said.
In the next split second Colton considered his options. He could ignore the silly notion of driving clear across the city to the hospital, and that would solve his problem. But no, he had dealt with the Lord too long; he knew better. If he said, "God spoke to me outside your door," these two people would probably think he was crazy and he would never get to counsel with them.
"I've just had an emergency call," he stammered. "I have to go to the hospital."
"Have some tea before you go," the young man offered as the preacher backed away.
"No time, even for tea," Colton blurted, picking up speed. "I'll see you another time," he called over his shoulder. "Make another appointment!"
He ran to the Volkswagen and sped away. Clear across Colombo he gripped the wheel. Something within him had begun to pulsate. But he couldn't tell what was going to happen. The traffic was terrible. Why couldn't all these people get out of the way? "Hurry, hurry," the inner voice said.
Colton screeched into the parking lot and bounded toward Nita's room. Suddenly he slowed to a walk. Nurses and aides were buzzing all around.
He relaxed, "Well, they must be taking good care of her."
But something about the scene, the faces, suddenly triggered panic in the little preacher. He pushed aside an attendant and peeked into the room. He was shocked. Nita lay crumpled at one edge of the bed, almost past struggling for breath. She had fallen from the bedrest as the nurses transferred her from the rolling cart. Now they were trying to pull her back up, but her gasping convulsions kept them from getting a solid grip on her.
Colton ran toward them. "Get the oxygen!" he shouted as he leaned over her taking charge over the surgical staff. "Call the doctor. Now!" he yelled.
"It's too late," the head nurse answered evenly, with the Buddhist reverence for death. "She is dying." For her, the only proper thing to do was to stand by and let the spirit depart from the body in peace.
Colton didn't answer her. Inside he began screaming. "No! Lord! You told me just last night this woman's witness will bring revival to Asia! I will not let her die!"
Colton pushed the nurses away and lifted up her convulsing body. He dumped her back on the bedrest and then held onto her, praying loudly, rebuking Satan, and crying out to God to spare her life.
The Buddhist attendants watched fearfully from the edges of the room. This strange man with the strange words must be a witchdoctor, for surely he was chanting over the sick one. They were afraid.
For over two hours Colton prayed. Nita's convulsions abated and she lay like a corpse, unconscious and unresponsive. But slowly, smoothly, she began the journey back. Deep in the recess of her spirit, she heard the distant prayers of a man who loved God. The words floated in and soothed her, like a healing balm, and she knew she was not alone.
She blinked slowly and tried to focus. Colton's hairy arms were extended down to her. He was rubbing her neck. His tie was loose and his blue short-sleeved shirt was drenched with sweat. His face and neck were shiny wet. And he was praying in a language she could not understand but somehow she knew it was very special to God.
She coughed weakly, and Colton opened his eyes, still massaging her neck muscles.
"Nita, this is Pastor Colton," he began gently. "We're with you. Jesus is here. Nita, God loves you. Jesus is here. You're coming through. Jesus is here ..."
A doctor came in and took Nita's pulse.
"She's all right," he said, trying to re-establish the official authority he and the staff had lost during the crisis.
"I know that," Colton said, and kept praying.
When the crisis had passed and Nita's mind was clear again, the miracle of Colton's return slowly dawned on her. From that moment she could not deny that God had His hand on her life, that He had sent this man to her as a friend and guide. Maybe, just maybe, there was an alternative to death.
But what did God want from her? She couldn't imagine.
Colton bounded like a hungry tiger into action. He began coming to the hospital at least twice a day, early in the morning and again in the afternoon, to visit with Nita; to pray with her; to talk through a Bible study with her and encourage her. Sometimes Suzanne accompanied him, and almost every day their young sons came along as well. Nita enjoyed the boys immensely as they climbed all over her, pinched her and tugged on her deformed toes and giggled and sang songs and told jokes and make funny faces, all trying to entertain her. Colton would drop by in the evenings too, as he visited other patients, and then sometimes later yet, when Nita's family had gone. On many evenings Colton was the last one to leave.
The cumulative hours of exposure to this strange little loving man and his sweet wife drew them into Nita's heart, and Nita into theirs. Week by week, she gradually opened up, chatting with Colton, talking about spiritual things, sometimes teasing him about his blind faith - but never again in the old combative way. Suzanne often brought homemade broth and fed it to her, easing some of the burden that Nita's mother had been carrying for so long. Nita grew deeply attached to the Wickramaratnes, and the attachment was mutual.
But Nita's body continued its undeniable breakdown. Her left hand had shrunk to half the size of her right, and her right hand lost its sensitivity now as well. She could hardly stand to look at her grotesque, hooked fingers. She was slowly curling up as her wasted muscles retracted inch by inch as the result of muscular atrophy. Her legs were strapped to metal calipers to keep them as straight as possible, but it was obvious the splints wouldn't work forever. She had to clear her throat constantly as the paralysis seeped into her neck. Headaches became more frequent, increasing in intensity until Nita thought her jaws would sink into each other. Colton spent hours standing next to her, rubbing her head to ease the pain which he could literally feel throbbing through her skull.
Colton and Suzanne often sat with Mrs. Edwards, praying in unity for their dear one, but nothing seemed to help. Nita refused to cry; refused to beg for help; refused to allow saccharin sympathy as her physical form steadily degenerated. Eventually her neck muscles gave way, and her head lurched helplessly to one side. Gasping respiratory attacks struck with frightful regularity. With each new crisis, nurses opened the oxygen cylinder and slapped the mask over Nita's face. One day the cylinder jammed and refused to open, as Nita choked. Colton prayed feverishly. Suzanne watched the nurses struggle with the cylinder as long as she could. Then she threw herself on the convulsing body and pressed her mouth against Nita's. She blew into the constricted throat again and again, until finally the seizure ended.
The end seemed to be coming every day, and the endless waiting took its toll on Nita's mother. Every day, for months, she had taken Nita's hand, looked heavenward, and prayed in simple, hopeful language for her daughter's healing. Over the months, that hand had warped and shrunk and twisted up, and still Mrs. Edwards' prayer was the same. Nita had rarely seen her cry. She had always been a source of strength and courage. But Mrs. Edwards went home every night and wept bitterly, agonizing over her child's condition. Every night, finally exhausted, she fell into a fitful sleep. Her appetite had vanished.
She had grown thin and, to those who had known her for long, gaunt. But Nita never knew the sorrow her mother was battling with.
The day came, however, when her mother's prayer of hope changed. In spite of the spurt of faith the little Pentecostal preacher had briefly generated in her, Mrs. Edwards could no longer hope for her daughter's health.
One night, thinking Nita was asleep and would not hear, she took the deformed little hand in her own and looked upward. She whispered, "Lord, I just can't take her suffering any longer. My girl hurts so much. Please take her home. Let her die!" The hot tears fell on Nita's crippled hand and she had heard it all.
But the Lord refused.
(CONTINUED IN NEXT POST)