Lord, instead of attending First Grade at Bane Elementary, for a year I sat in my wheelchair in class with 15 other polio victims at Hedgecroft Hospital. Across from me sat an expressionless high school girl with hair cut short like her dreams of going to her Senior Prom and dancing to the music of her dreams stilled by paralysis.
As I sat near the teacher loaned to us from Spring Branch ISD, as each day passed I found my eyes drawn to a dollhouse in the back of the classroom. That dollhouse strangely attracted me to it as iron shavings to a magnet.
As the class emptied one day, I worked up the courage to ask the orderly to push my wheelchair up next to the dollhouse and to leave me there alone to study it and to understand the attraction it held for me, a boy, not a girl.
Suddenly, I was overcome with tears. I realized this dollhouse was not just any house. As I peered into its rooms I could smell my mother’s cooking from her kitchen. In the dining room I could see my family seated around the table and holding hands and saying grace. In the bedroom I could hear the voice of my mom saying the Lord’s Prayer as she knelt by my bed. I wondered whether my parents, brother, and sister missed me as much as I ached for them.
As I sat daily next to the dollhouse in quietude and prayer for the rest of that year, I learned a far greater lesson than the teacher could ever teach. That the dollhouse was not only a dollhouse. God, it was Your house with a room for me, before, during and after polio.
Lord, thanks for the dollhouse You sent me when I was separated from my loved ones at age six with polio. Thanks for making room for me and all Your children on Earth and in Heaven in the comfort and warmth of Your care and everlasting love. Amen
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Jack H. Emmott is a Senior Counsel of Gray, Reed & McGraw, LLP, a 120-lawyer full service firm in Houston, Texas, a Board-Certified Family Law and Master Credentialed Collaborative Law Professional Divorce Attorney, Mediator, Author, Entrepreneur and Inspirational Speaker. For more information about Jack or his latest book, Bending Angels: Living Messengers of God’s Love, go to the Bending Angel website.
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