A Mighty Fortress of God
I was woken by the bright red bird fluttering in the emerald cage of jasmine branches and tapping urgently on my window-pane. Peeking through the partially open Venetian blinds, I could see my excited friend jumping up and down. I turned and looked at the early hour on the clock.
“What a good omen,” I thought to myself. Today we would receive the results of my daughter’s biopsy. From the moment we had received news of the suspicious mammogram over a week ago, a menacing shadow had fallen across our entire family.
“Cancer means cells have gone wild,” said one friend, after learning her sister had been diagnosed with the dread disease. I ‘googled’ everything I could find on benign and malignant tumours. My daughter’s name was on every prayer list, and in letters to Baba. I stayed on my knees, burying heart, head, and red eyes deep in God’s comforting lap.
Then my daughter said something that really put this entire experience into perspective, “Mom, I was in my puja [worship] room asking Swami why this was happening to me. A paper on which I had written the Lakshmi Devi mantra [prayer] started quivering, and suddenly I realized that this is to bring me closer to God and to get over the body!” I listened, amazed by words wise beyond her years. Could this be a blessing in disguise?
Yet, as hard as I tried, it was difficult to hold onto this truth. I felt my equanimity slipping as I vacillated between utter terror, worry, doubt, and faith, hope, confidence and numbness. Those pictures of Atlas shouldering the burden of the world are nothing compared to what a mother bears! I would gladly have exchanged places with my daughter.
Through it all, Sri Sathya Sai Baba’s presence was intensely felt. He visited Kendra in three dreams prior to the mammogram, and even invited the whole family to His ashram in India. Then right before the biopsy, there was another heavenly encounter with our Lord Sai. This time my daughter found herself materializing objects for Him! No doubt He was showing her that she was not a mere mortal but truly divine and so much more than her body.
On the day of Kendra’s biopsy she put on a brave face, but inside we both were basket cases. The scorched eyes of her husband, whose mother had died of breast cancer, said it all. We thought of the thousands of women undergoing this ordeal, some with children in strollers just like my daughter, praying for the blessed “b” word, benign. A friend from New York who possessed the gift of clairvoyance tried to reassure us, “It’s nothing, nothing, don’t worry, they won’t even take it out.”
Again, a gentle rap on my window, I got up and embraced the day. Throughout the morning and afternoon, God’s awesome presence was palpable. When I went out to retrieve the mail, a swift arrow-like bird shot past me, then looped around barely brushing my hips. And just before I received the glad tidings, “No Cancer!”, I counted 19 birds seated like tiny angels on the telephone wire in front of my house.
Om Sai Ram! Thank you God, for saving my baby, Kendra.
~Sonya Ki, USA
