Article July 21, 1997 Issue

Always loved

Gloria McElroy Pennell

Friends were discussing the best gift they'd ever received—a red bicycle, their first car, needed cash. For me, it was a bowl of cherries.

My mother and I were very close. We lived just two blocks apart. It really was not so strange, then, that shortly after her passing, I got up in the middle of the night, walked the two blocks to her house, and sat on her doorstep. I was conscious only of an indescribable longing for her. As I looked down at my bare feet and my body clad in nightclothes, I sought to rationalize my behavior and called out to God, "But I expected more from You! I thought You would be of more help when I needed You." Immediately I thought of these words from Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures by Mary Baker Eddy: "The intercommunication is always from God to His idea, man" (p. 284). I resolved then and there to stop telling God how miserable I was and, instead, to listen to what He had to say to me.

The next day while grocery shopping, I noticed that the first cherries of the season had been put on the shelves. Knowing my fondness for them and being quite artistic, my mother would have chosen some for me, I thought, and she would have brought them to me, perhaps, in a highly polished mahogany bowl with a gardenia on top or, perhaps, on a silver tray with a long-stemmed rose to the side. I missed her.

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