Nudges of Grace

This morning just before I started my 5K walk, I reflexively checked the email on my phone. What I saw absolutely stopped me in my tracks, and I had to take a couple of minutes to regroup.

The first two emails were little nudges to respond or follow up to older messages. The top one was something I had written on April 26 on Camino in France and mailed to myself, a musing bit of verse that began with the line “Do you miss me?”

The second was a reply from Francine, written in 2023 to our Deacon inquiry group. In it, she explained that she was currently in Spain serving as an hospitalera at the Albergue Santiago el Real in Logroño, and that she was looking forward to telling us all about it when she returned.

Today is of course the feast of Saint Lawrence, a saint I have been close to for years. He was a deacon and a martyr of the church of Rome.

The first email was tagged as “follow up” and the second as “remind me”.

As a Christian I cannot, and I do not, believe in coincidence. Yes, some will argue that this is simply the Gmail algorithm doing its thing. But why specifically those two messages?

I confess I cried a little on my walk. I very much felt like this was Francine reaching out to me from the arms of Jesus to remind me to keep working on the books that have sprung out of my experiences over the last year and a half.

I did call a priest friend for a sanity check, and after hearing the story he confirmed that I was well within my normal sanity range. That’s mostly comforting.

Everything is grace. I don’t definitively know what this episode means, but I am taking it as a grace and an encouragement.

I mentioned the text of the first email in my blog at the time, where I described it as a “sad little poem”, and I indicated that I was not yet ready to share it. Apparently, now is the time.

Do you miss me?
Or are you closer to me than ever before?
You seem so far away,
Though sometimes I can feel you near,
Walking beside me,
Flashing me a smile as you walk beside me.

Do you miss me,
As much as I am missing you?
The days we’ll never have,
The walks we’ll never walk together.

Do you miss me?
Or are you right there beside me?
I’m crying enough for the both of us.
I’m crying enough.

Do you miss me?
Where are you closer than you’ve ever been before?