Grace through Maybe

"Maybe! She said maybe!" My young children danced around the living room shouting over and over, "Maybe! She said maybe!" I'd grunted a maybe from a deep, heavy nap on the couch. My son and daughter, about 5 and 3 at the time, had leaned in close to me where I could feel their sweet breath on my face, and whispered, "Mom, can we ..." Well, that part I don't remember, but it was a request for something my kids loved for me to agree to. Swimming, chocolate chip cookies, a trip to the playground, I don't know exactly. But what I do know is that "maybe" set joy in their hearts and set them to jumping up and down with excitement. A simply "maybe." It's become an "inside story," and family members of all ages still get the same thrill when I utter "maybe." She said maybe! It's followed me for 29 years, so far.

I've personally disregarded a maybe as being too vague, and allowing for too big a chance of "probably not." I like things as definite as I can get them, even if it means waiting to the last minute to pull out a firm yes or no.

That was until yesterday. In the shower. Again, in the shower. I don't know why my most profound awarenesses and God moments can be tracked back to the shower, but they can. Perhaps it's the life giving water rushing over my body, the warmth, the seclusion from the rest of the world where my thoughts can be their loudest, and their most quiet. A place where mental cleansing accompanies physical cleansing.

Regardless, so it was there that the power of maybe came pressing into me. In my father's final days locked down in immobility, it fell to me to tend to his hospice medications. There was the one mediation that would cause him great relief, but which also signaled acceptance that his breath was no longer his own. A medication that eased the body's struggle between this world and the next. Those of us who were with him put on the proverbial encouraging, assuring, and happy face, but sadly, I've always felt his eyes told me he knew.

With each dose, even as I offered assurance that this would ease his breath and help him rest, I felt his eyes asked me "why." I felt his luminous eyes, still full of the quick soul that was his, ask me "why," and plead "No. No. Not this." My soul was crushed, and yet I continued, knowing ...

And then, these two years later of my carrying that weight of his deep, pleading eyes, came the words through the muted world of the shower, "Maybe his eyes weren't pleading with you to stop, or accusing you of forcing him out. Maybe his eyes were saying he understood. Maybe he was saying thank you, Rhonda."

Those words, prefaced with that powerfully hopeful word maybe gave me a new hope and new relief I'd previously dared not even approach, or ever thought to approach. Maybe? Really? Maybe? I cried that word over and over and over. Maybe. Maybe. Maybe. Maybe flowed over me like the cascading water. Like that oil flowing over Aaron's beard. Then maybe became probably, and probably became Yes. And Yes became Grace. Oh, wondrous Grace. A rite of passage into Grace through maybe.