She Made a Good Call
Corinne Edwards looked at her watch, then shrugged her shoulders and began interviewing her first guest.
His name was Larry Dossey. He was a doctor who had written about the power of combining medicine with prayer—and the power of thought as a form of prayer.Corinne is a good TV host. She takes her guests and their work seriously. She reads their books, and she is genuinely interested in each subject she discusses. Her cameraman signaled a break.“Your next guest isn’t here yet, Corinne,” he said.“No problem,” Corinne said. She knew something her cameraman didn’t. She knew her next guest would show.I was scheduled to do a closing speech at a fund-raiser in Minnesota. It was part of a mini-tour I had agreed to do some time ago. It was nearing time for me to get onstage. It was a fund-raiser to raise money to send adolescents to chemical-dependency treatment, an issue I deeply believed in during a time when people were wondering if that was a good place for extra money in our world to go.At the fund-raiser, as the time for me to speak neared, my stomach starting hurting. Aching badly. I could hardly sit up. I felt sweaty, nauseous, cramped, sick. I excused myself from the table, went to the rest room, and splashed cold water on my face. I needed to pull it together, do what I came here to do.Luckily it was the end of the evening and my bit was small. I had gone through the drill of public speaking enough to do what I needed to do, even sick.Thank God for podiums, I thought, giving my little spiel. If I didn’t have something to hold myself up with, I’d fall down.I got back to my hotel room about eleven o’clock that night. I didn’t know if I had caught a virus or if I’d eaten some bad food, but I was sick. Really ill. I ordered some tea and water from room service and tried to calm my stomach. I was supposed to get up at 4 A.M. and fly down to Chicago to make an appearance on a TV show. That left me five hours to get feeling better and get at least a fair night’s sleep. At one o’clock I was still awake, lying in bed in the fetal position with a bad stomachache.
The most sleep I can possibly get now is three hours, I thought, staring at the clock like it was my enemy. It’s not looking good for tomorrow’s television show.At quarter to two I got up and called my publicist’s cell phone. “Call Corinne Edwards. Give her my apologies,” I said. “I’m really sick. I just can’t go.”I’d never be able to fly down to Chicago feeling this way, with two hours of sleep. I canceled my wakeup call, too. Once I fell asleep, I wanted to sleep for as long as I could and give my body a chance to rest and heal. Somewhere between two and two-thirty I finally dozed off.When I woke up I looked at the clock, wondering how long I’d slept.It was only four in the morning! What was I doing up now? I closed my eyes, rolled over, and tried to get back to sleep.
I couldn’t. I groaned, pulled the covers over my head. By now I was squeezing my eyes shut. Arrrrgh! Okay. Alright already, I thought. I dragged my tired weak body out of bed. I can’t do this. I’m not doing this. I’ve already canceled, I thought. At the same time I was thinking that, I was throwing on some clothes and grabbing my purse.Whoever I was arguing with was winning, because I walked out the door, despite my complaints, drove to the airport, and got on that plane.I walked into the TV studio looking like something the proverbial cat dragged in. The makeup lady did her magic.Thank God for face paint, I thought, looking in the mirror. I was looking and feeling almost human by the time I went onstage.
I did the interview with Corinne. She wanted to talk about Codependent No More. It was the fifteenth anniversary of that book. I liked her interview. She had read the book. Seemed interested in it and in me. More than that, she seemed to genuinely care about the viewers watching her show.When the interview ended, she invited me to stay for pizza and Coke. I thanked her, but declined. “I’m still weak and sick. I didn’t sleep last night. In fact,I wasn’t planning on coming here today,” I said. Then I explained what had happened to me. “I’m surprised I showed,” I said.“I’m not,” she said back.We talked about some things we had in common. She shared with me that she was a widow, and had written a book, Reflections from a Woman Alone.
“Did you know that I have a son who died, too?”I said I didn’t know that, and told her I was sorry about her loss.“I’ve been trying to get you on my show for five years,” Corinne said. “Whenever I’d call your publicist, they’d just tell me that Melody doesn’t go on the road anymore. Finally they called me and told me you were doing some media this fall. I was so excited. Yesterday I had the funniest feeling, like something was wrong. So I just asked God and my son—the one that passed over—to make sure to get you here no matter what.”Each of us has a different explanation for the events that transpire in our lives. It may not make sense to others. I’m not sure that it matters as long as it makes sense to us. There’s more to life than we can see with our eyes. Remember, the sun isn’t rising or setting—it’s standing still.Some things are true whether we see—and believe—them or not.It’s God’s will. People said that to me when my son died. They said it to me when my marriage went bad, and I lost all those dreams and hopes.
Usually it’s something that people say when things turn sour and we’re in a lot of pain.It may be true, but it’s not a comforting thing to hear. Usually when I need to be held in God’s arms the most, someone is screaming at me that God wants me to feel the way that I don’t want to feel and wants me to lose whatever I’ve just lost.I think what people are really trying to say is: there’s a Plan. It may not feel good right now, but if you go through this pain, things are going to work out. In my younger days, I could look at a situation and see only one or two possibilities for how things could work out. The older I’ve gotten, the more I’ve seen that there are ways things can work out that I could spend a lifetime trying to imagine and not even come close.Sometimes walking our path and living our lives is like putting a big jigsaw puzzle together. The problem usually is that we don’t know what the whole picture looks like and we often don’t have all the pieces yet. We get them—sometimes one by one—as we go through the days.I was talking to a woman one day after she had just finished going through an excruciatingly painful six months. Things had not gone the way she hoped and planned. She wondered a lot of the time why so many things were going wrong. Then in one moment—as can happen sometimes—the final piece of the puzzle came into place. She saw how everything worked out, and how everything worked out well—better than it would have had she done it herself.
Don’t you just love God’s will?” she said. “Yes, I do,” I said. “But not usually while it’s working itself out.
”From the book: Choices: Taking Control of Your Life and Making It Matter
