~10:53pm~  EST
PLEASE PRAY:  In just that quick your life can change - are you ready?

The phone call that we knew since Feburary of this year - might come - finally has. Early tomorrow The Lovely Bride boards a plane headed for California to say goodbye. There is little that can be said at this time. This part of life is hard, and not without considerable pain - regardless of the amount of suffering someone has been through. I watched my Mom be bed-ridden for weeks and elude death multiple times in the final months... yet in that moment... nothing quite prepares you for it.

The details are...last Friday Mom began feeling worse. On Saturday while she and Dad had gotten away for a respite, her eyes began to yellow. Her actions became lethargic, and speech slurred. By Tuesday her cancer specialist had sent staff to draw blood to have it tested. By Wednesday morning the results were back...

Mom's liver is in essence in complete failure. The toxins are building up in her bloodstream and she is basically pain-free right now.The doctors told the family that this process will continue and eventually cause her to become more and more sleepy. This has already begun as she is now sleeping much of the day. Eventually she will go into a coma, and never come out.

The Lovely Bride is headed out to be there with her to say goodbye, hold her hand, kiss her face, and cherish her ride into eternity.

Mom is a hero by every measure. She has battled cancer for a decade. The family was told 10 years ago that she would not survive, and yet - she has seen both of her children graduate from high school and college. She has witnessed her daughter's marriage and been a supportive encourager to our young life together.

After sickness came she began to speak openly about a newness to the relationship she had with God. And up till this last season she was actively involved in teaching and discipling younger women at her church in how to be more Godly wives, better moms, and woman of steadfast character. She has wondered publicly if her life has amounted to much. But these doubts rest only in her mind.

If you had a chance to hear from the lips of the women who have taken her classes. The difference she has made in families and the lives of the women she has taught has been profound. When we were last with her in May of this year, she was talking AGAIN of starting up a bible study - in her home - to continue to bring encouragement to her own heart as well as other women.

She has endured more than nearly anyone I've ever known on this earth, and yet she saw her accomplishments here as little compared to the working of God in her own heart and life.

That's why a year ago Christmas I invited her to come on my radio show in New York and do something she had never done - share her life changing wisdom and common sense with all of New York - via the airwaves of WMCA.

My good friends Dick and Mel Tunney wrote a song on one of Mel's FIRST CALL records that was called "The Future"... It's words brought comfort to my heart in 1997 when my mother was walking through this stage of life, and they return to mind now...

We may not know what the future holds...but we know WHO holds the future!

This is the promise that we cling to tonight. Tonight on the eve of The Lovely Bride's birthday, a day that celebrates one of Mom's more significant moments in her life...

Tonight we rest light, we pray hard, we feel deeply, and cry much!

Tomorrow we rest on Him, we trust His goodness and do so even when we can not trace His hands, and we give thanks.

For whether it is but one more day, month, or season...God is being honored by the life lived by The Mother of the Bride. We ask you join us in prayer - for God's will to be done, and for The Lovely Bride and the family to be given the strength to endure - and to know God's touch in this shadow-time.

PS. 115:3 - For our God is in HEAVEN, and does what pleased Him!


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