Free From – Chapter 8 – July 8th

I hope you will join me this month as we JOURNEY each day through our short story. It is about finding FREEDOM in the midst of all the captivating pieces in life that steal our peace which we need FREE FROM!

FREE FROM
July 8, 2021

Philippians 4:6-7, ‘Don’t fret or worry. Instead of worrying, pray. Let petitions and praises shape your worries into prayers, letting God know your concerns. Before you know it, a sense of God’s wholeness, everything coming together for good, will come and settle you down. It’s wonderful what happens when Christ displaces worry at the center of your life.’ (TPT)

Chapter 8

In the beginning, the years were friendly and kind. Legend and Annie married quickly, before a Justice of the Peace. She had a nurse friend from the hospital where she worked, and his boss stood for him. They were in a rush to get on with life together, and Annie wanted to come to Legend restored, pure, his bride. He had never heard of such a thing, saving oneself for marriage, but what it boiled right down to—he would have walked on water to her, across hot lava had she asked, made a rotation around the sun. He had to admit; she was more than worth the wait and it was kinda cool, but it sure took some effort and some strength to remember the end game.
They were like children playing ‘house’. Annie couldn’t suppress her happiness, kept clapping her hands like a little kid. Soon his bachelor pad was flooded with feminine artistry, fancy colors and schemes. From the moment Legend carried her across the threshold, the place never again resembled the previous handful of years of his life where he barely held on to life by a thread and hid in loneliness and silence. She transformed his entire world with her grace, and her laughter chased shadows from corners and lit up the dank air with pervasive perfume. She scrubbed the floors, whitewashed the windows; everything Annie touched, shone. Life was blissful.
The most difficult part of life became their schedules. He worked days and she had a night shift, four-tens; they ached when they were apart. Those hours were like trying to row a boat upstream against a current with a tree branch, like watching a pot come to a boil or waiting for Christmas morning. Just the opposite, the seldom hours they had off together reminded Legend of how fast the plane flew when he went to war versus the miles that slowly passed by the window of the aircraft that brought him home. Legend and Annie never ran out of things to say to each other and there was simply not enough time. Annie was adamant about attending church and Legend mostly wanted to please his bride, so he agreed to anything she asked. Soon they were surrounded by a congregation of older married couples who had untold amounts of wisdom to share and politely they entertained each nugget of truth. There were kids their own age already divorcing one another and his lungs didn’t function apart from Annie so they didn’t really fit anywhere but with one another. That was okay too. All their lives, for both of them, they had been square pegs trying to be squeezed into round holes, and the fact they finally fit one another was like finding a four-leaf clover in a field of grass. Legend looked back and for as far back as he could envision, she was all he could see. He couldn’t even recall a time Annie hadn’t been present. The guys made fun of him at work but he didn’t care. He’d take one for the team anytime, as he rushed home to have even hopefully a couple moments of cuddling before she walked down the street to work at the hospital near where they still lived.
“Oh, my goodness! What is wrong, Annie?!” he demanded as he catapulted through the door to surprise her. His boss had given him an extra hour off paid so they could have just a little cuddle with a tiny bit of cushion. So kind, but he wasn’t prepared to find her laying on the floor writhing in pain and discomfort, her hands clutching her abdomen.
He dropped to his knees beside her after grabbing a wet cloth from the sink which he used to mop her brow. “What is it, baby?” he asked; and suddenly for the first time noticing the pool of blood she lay in, soaking her nurse uniform, seeming to gush from inside of her.
“I wanted to surprise you…” Annie wailed, unable to hold back her tears any longer.

To Be Continued…