"Donna With Grandpa Hanna on her wedding day."
Operation Restoration
My Grandfather was a country physician. He was a
huge man, gruff and intimidating on the outside but as soft as caramel on the
inside. He was the best grandpa a little girl could have and I remember sitting
on his lap and listening to his many stories.
He began practicing during the flu epidemic that
followed the Great War and tended people though the Great Depression for
payment in chickens and cabbages or whatever could be spared. After delivering
hundreds of babies at home, Grandpa Hanna opened his own maternity hospital. He
was its cook, ambulance driver, and attending physician. I assume it was at
this juncture that he built his custom wooden operating table. It was a tall
table, with drawers and a cupboard beneath, and a pull out section to
accommodate the patient’s feet and another on the side for surgical
instruments.
Grandpa didn’t retire until he was over eighty and
he lived ten years after that. When he finally died, a nurse attending him, who
had been his student at Regina’s nursing school decades earlier declared, “The
mighty oak has fallen.”
The one thing I wanted to remember him by was that
operating table. We refinished it and used it, believe it or not, as a kitchen
island in our first home in Edmonton. It added a lot of charm to our spanking
new house and was always a conversation piece. But a few years later when we
needed to sell the house and move to Calgary, we had to leave it behind. The
whole house sale was dependent on the inclusion of the “kitchen island” as the
buyers so coldly put it. Parting with it broke my heart. So I placed a note
inside the cupboard of the table that said something like this: This piece of furniture has great
sentimental value to me. If you ever decide to get rid of it, please let me
know so that I have the opportunity to claim it.
We moved, years passed, and I concluded I would
never see the beloved antique again. But then I got a letter from the current
owner of the table. It was no longer wanted. At that point, I had neither money
nor space for the table—not even in the kitchen. But I desperately wanted it
back in the family where it belonged. My sister, Debbie, lover of all things
old and sentimental, conscripted my dad to rent a utility trailer and drive
with her to Edmonton to redeem the table. She brought it back to her home and
restored it.
It lived first in her office and then her sewing
room for over two decades. After my precious sister joined her Savior in
heaven, her husband decided to sell the home he shared with her. In the process,
he gave the operating table back to me. We moved it into our current, more
spacious home recently. Now it is restored and redeemed. It looks a lot like it
did when Grandpa used it to heal people. And once again, it belongs to me.
The story is too like the Gospel of Jesus not to
draw comparisons. I was the rightful owner of the operating table, but the
treasure was lost to me. Then even though it should never have been removed
from my possession, someone who loved me, with resources I did not have, bought
it back. Redemption. She then returned it to its original condition.
Restoration.
Jesus created you and me. He is our rightful owner.
Yet our own choice tore us from him and he mourned. But at great expense, he
bought us back, even though by rights we belonged to him the whole time. He
restored us to an untainted state with his blood so that we could enter
relationship with him. If we know Jesus, we have been redeemed. We are being
restored. There is no greater story than this!
Excerpted from Donna Carter’s book:
Kick the Boring Out of Your Life,
(Harvest House 2015)
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