Frank Checks In!

Hey Everyone,

I wanted to thank Ryan and everyone for making this blog wonderful and for everyone's contributions. I read it often, and living on my own now, I've had to learn how to cook (not a small feat), and these recipe's have given me a little taste of home while I've been up here in Boston.

I loved seeing everyone at the cottage in November, it just reminded how great the Petroskey clan is and how much I love each and every one of you.

Anyways, I also wanted to share an experience I had this morning.

I've been trying to find a church that I like, so I have been "church-hopping" so to speak. I got up this morning to go to a 10am service at a church I'd hadn't been to before. When I got there, I couldn't find a parking space, so instead of going home, I decided to try a different church, a little closer to my house, that had a 10:30am service, again at another church I hadn't been to before.

Just by chance, this particular week, Grace Episcopal had a guest Pastor, Nicholas Gilbert, who has worked as a Chaplin at a Rhode Island Hospital for the past 5 years deliver the sermon. Part of his sermon today was describing a woman who was extremely nervous about an upcoming surgery and asked to spend some extra time with Pastor Gilbert leading up to it. After the surgery was over, she had some severe complications, where she even went into cardiac arrest and had to undergo an additional 6-hour emergency surgery.

A few days into her recovery from the second surgery, she asked to speak privately to Pastor Gilbert, and she proceeded to describe what she felt when she was experiencing the extreme complications. She told him she had died and been brought back to life. Remembering what this state felt like, she described seeing all the wonderful people that had touched her life and passed on before her. This group even included the adult version of her own infant child that had died from SIDS many years before.

While listening to the Pastor tell this story, I couldn't help but remember Grandpa and the stories he recounted from times when he faced similar complications during various surgeries, and his eerily similar recounts of seeing "so many old friends." I was thinking deep and hard about how much I missed Grandpa and how he was such a special person. And at that moment, I felt a deep warmth come over my body like some was engulfing me in a big bear-hug. Much like the "big squeeze" Grandpa always demanded anytime we came into a room that he was in. I can't help but believe that it was Grandpa's way of letting us know he was doing just fine up in Heaven.

I believe God works in mysterious ways, and I can't help but think that it was not a coincidence that led me to this Church on this particular Sunday.

I love and miss you all very deeply and I hope this note finds everyone doing well.

Thanks again for the great recipes.

Love,

Frank

P.S. I couldn''t seem to figure out how to post this story to the blog (aka the Dale "lack of technology knowledge" gene coming out in me), so feel free to copy and paste it there if you want too.