How often do we ignore the sirens of first responder vehicles?   How often are we completely annoyed in having to pull off the road to let these vehicles pass?  How often do we think of the reason and the lives behind the sirens?   Some topics are more difficult to write about than others.  It is definitely a defense mechanism of my own to try to forget and ignore what might make me melt into a blubbering mess.  After all my children need a strong mother, my patients and coworkers need a happy hard worker, our church needs happy faces and strong singing voices leading worship and teaching, etc…  There often is very little time to grieve and be alone in one’s thoughts in such a fast paced world that never stops.

About a month ago as I was driving to my mother’s home I passed an ambulance with its sirens and lights blaring.  The significance was that it passed me on the same road and in the same section of the road that the ambulance that carried my father had passed me.  As I pulled over to the side of the road in the same spot I had on March 11th my heart jumped to my throat in the same way it had on that dreaded day.  On the day my father passed I happened to be on the phone with a life long friend who has had more than her fair share of life’s pain. She had returned my call after I left a voicemail asking her for prayer.   As the ambulance passed I remember crying out “That’s my dad in there!”

The day my dad went to heaven as the ambulance passed my vehicle the sirens signified a change in life for my family.  As a medical worker there has always been significance in the sirens to me, but it is always deeper when they represent change in one’s own life.  When a medical helicopter is coming or going from the hospital there is a family in pain, when an ambulance, police car, or a fire truck has sirens blaring there is a family in pain.

Why do I feel led to write this today?  I never really know why God puts certain topics and verses on my heart.  We live in a hurting world that seems to show less and less love and compassion.  Maybe it is a reminder for myself and anyone who reads to pray.  Pray when we see an emergency vehicle, pray for the first responders, pray for the families that evil is directly impacting across our world, pray for God’s peace, pray for God’s wisdom, and pray for a troubled world to seek Jesus.  The day my dad died it hurt for us here and changed our way of life especially my mother’s.  It was a day of victory as well.  You see because he knew Jesus as his Lord and Savior he is in heaven today.   I pray for our world to know that hope and to know the One that is truly the answer to every problem and trouble.  Jesus is the answer for the world.

1 Corinthians 1:3-4 “Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves have received from God.”