Blessed by Blessing

"Do you want my blanket?” the elderly woman startled me by asking. She had said she was cold, so I draped a blanket from the back of her chair around her, and she explained that she always felt cold. I said I was cold lots of times, too, and that’s when she offered me her blanket.

“Oh, no,” I told her, “I’m not cold now.” We were at a nursing home where I had come with my husband, since he had an appointment to visit Ruth, an elderly patient, with some “music therapy”--singing with the guitar and playing an inspirational CD in her room.

“I’ll find Ruth for you,” the attendant said. We found her, not in her room, but dozing as she sat on a couch in a lounge area. “Can you just do your ministry here?” the director asked. Howard agreed, and soon she had pushed up a half-dozen wheelchair occupants, and he began strumming the guitar. We were used to ministering one evening a month to a large group gathered in the activities room, but this was out in the open with people working and walking all around us, so it took a few minutes for us to settle in.

My husband was trying to be effective without making a disturbance, so he wasn’t belting out the songs in his usual exuberant manner. I added my rather thin accompaniment though, and the plea in his eyes encouraged me to keep singing. Although Ruth never opened her eyes, the rest of our group listened, smiled, or tried to sing along. Occasionally, an aide quietly administered meds or unobtrusively checked an area of concern on a foot or leg. I couldn’t help noticing her attentiveness as her smile lit up her face while talking and tending to a patient. She would even fondly kiss and hug her charge as if it were her own mother.

What love she must have for them! One could see that they responded in kindness, too, as had the lady who offered me her blanket. After a few songs, Howard played the CD, while we sat quietly listening to the beautiful strains of “Be Still and Know That I Am God”. A large aquarium containing a huge fish was next to us, and it seemed the fish swam gracefully to the rhythm of the song, occasionally being still as if in awe of its Creator.

“Thelma, you are lovely,” Howard surprised me by saying as we left the service. “I’d rather sing with you than anybody.” Well, I do know his songs, and we actually sang together in church when we were teenagers, but I had held back through the years in favor of better singers. I might reconsider. I was feeling the love, too.