What name are you looking for?

Grandma's house has always had a special meaning; it has been the center of family gatherings and the family kitchen; the stove in grandma's house was on even when the refrigerator and drawers were empty. There was a time when the grandparents lived on a second floor with a small balcony overlooking a green area full of trees just across the street. For years it was part of the family tradition to go once a week to eat beans and pork rinds at the grandparents' house.

A Thursday, Grandpa suffered a stroke after having beans for lunch with the family while he was playing with the grandchildren next to the trees as was his custom. The grandchildren came up to the house to say that they did not know what had happened to Grandpa, that from one moment to the next, he had stopped playing with them; the children ran to the balcony to see what had happened and saw Grandpa on the floor with difficulty breathing and with half of his body paralyzed. The children put him in a car and took him to the emergency room.

That was the last day Grandpa said a word, walked and could use the bathroom alone.

In the afternoon that same day, when the doctors had already stabilized Grandpa in the hospital, my mother asked me to be with Grandpa for a few hours so the children could get some air, go home and pick up what they needed to come to be with Grandpa. I remember sitting next to him and seeing him very restless to say something, but of course, he could no longer speak; it was just his first few hours of not being able to talk and only moving his left hand. At that time, I was a restless physical therapy student who wanted to find a way to communicate with him, so I remember taking a board on which I wrote the letters of the alphabet and I approached him and told him to point to me one letter at a time until we built the word he was trying to say. Grandpa pointed to the letter G, and I precociously started saying names starting with the letter G while Grandpa kept shaking his head; after a couple of minutes, I told him to point to the other letter to see if that would make it easier to guess the name he wanted to say. Grandpa pointed to A; we already had GA; by now, the choice of names was narrowed down, and I kept trying to guess, but Grandpa kept shaking his head. Again I asked him to point to the following letter, and he pointed to S; we already had GAS, and I was pretty confused because, in Spanish, few names start with GAS. We both ended up frustrated. Apparently, he had not made himself understood, and I had not been able to understand him.

Life went on, and in the following days, I went to grandma's house to greet her while grandpa was still hospitalized. That morning I noticed grandma was worried, and after thinking about it for a while, I asked her what was wrong; she told me that that day they had to pay for the gas bill so that they would not cut it off, and they did not have the money to pay for it. Grandpa was responsible for paying the utilities.

When grandma said GAS, I understood that grandpa was worried about the bill and not about a person. The years have shown me that I am still learning because, in my relationship with the Lord, I still want to guess a name that begins with GAS, and I don't see that the Lord is talking to me about something else.

And you, what name are you looking for?