"Keep clinging to the Rock! Fear not my loving friend and try to smile outwardly even when your gentle heart is breaking."This line comes from one of Sr. Georgina's last email messages to me. Early this year, she got really sick and she now lives in a nursing home. She is undergoing therapy and, little by little, she has started to walk again.
Yesterday I got a surprise call from Sr. Anne, another Sister from her community. Sr. Georgina asked her to give me a ring and to give me her love.
I cried. This Sister, who has been sick for a long time, and who is taking slow and painful steps to get back on her feet again, this Sister has thought, nay, is thinking about me.
Dear, good Sr. Georgina, it is not I who have a gentle heart. It is you who have it. You have been with me in the most difficult moments of my life. You have kept watch with me as I contemplated, in my own life, the mystery of the cross - when my mother died, when I left my country to live in a foreign land, when my sister left the Institute, when I struggled with a very painful experience of rejection, and now as I live in my flesh the solitude of midlife transitions.
For me Sr. Georgina is like a lighthouse, an assurance, especially in a tempest, to keep rowing or to keep swimming because there is dry land.
Thank you, Sr. Georgina, for being an expression of God's tender mercies. Thank you for sharing with me your good and gentle heart.
PS. By the way she ended her message with these words "Sr. Georgina friend forever through thick and thin."
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