Life Support by Robert Whitlow

remedy for his negative feelings was not to bang out a demand toward heaven. The presence of God is wooed, not coerced, and tonight he began with notes of quiet reflection intended as an invitation. He didn’t say a prayer; he played one.
    As often happened, the music took Ted to a place he hadn’t planned to go. He came to the sanctuary to ask for revival and healing power. Instead, the invitation led to a musical oasis where his heavenly Father reminded him of his divine love. From that spring, all living water flowed, and the rippling of the notes brought a sweet peace into the room and to Ted’s soul. The balm of Gilead is gentle, not strident, and the notes expressed in music the endless compassion of the God who loves his children with an eternal love. Tears pooled in Ted’s eyes, and two matching drops rolled slowly down his cheeks. No matter the dryness of the spiritual landscape around him, this refreshing flowed in the presence of the Lord.
    Ted blinked back the tears. Usually, he played with his eyes open as he stared into the darkness. Sometimes, glimpses of light flashed by the corner of his vision as unseen messengers gathered to watch and wonder. Occasionally, he played with his eyes shut and enhanced to the fullest his sensitivity to the sounds produced by his hands. But always, from beginning to end, it was a spontaneous composition never heard before nor reproduced again. It was a new creation and flowed from the depths of the musician’s spirit to the place where anointed music goes.
    Ted could change from one key to another as effortlessly as a landscape artist selecting a different color. The sounds began to build. He transitioned to the deep-throated notes of the lower octaves. He stayed for several minutes in the lower range and let the call build in intensity. Ted had learned not to hurry from one theme to the next and sustained the suspense until the urge to move higher became irresistible. When his hands finally climbed up the keyboard, the sound exploded as the entire range of the piano’s capabilities was fully revealed. Nature answered with thunder from a distant lightning strike. Ted lost himself in the music and found himself in the manifest presence of God—the place where all the praise of a lifetime is not enough.
    An hour later the last note softly soared away. Ted let out a deep breath and lifted his hands from the keyboard. His burden lifted. His petition set free.

8
    A persistent vegetative state or other condition of permanent unconsciousness.
    S.C. CODE 44-77-50
    D riving to work in the morning, Alexia turned on a local radio station and learned about Baxter Richardson. The news report was short on details.
    A member of a well-known Santee family, Baxter Richardson, was seriously injured while hiking yesterday with his wife in the mountains near Greenville. Richardson was airlifted from the area by helicopter and taken to Greenville Memorial Hospital, where he is listed in critical condition.
    Ezra Richardson was one of Ralph Leggitt’s biggest clients. Alexia didn’t do any legal work involving Mr. Richardson’s business holdings, but she’d heard that Ralph Leggitt often filled in the blanks on his daily time sheet with a single entry: “Richardson—General Matters.” Two hundred thousand dollars in annual legal fees to the local businessman was as certain as the monthly phone bill. The peripheral benefits reaped by Leggitt from minority ownership interest in some of Richardson’s ventures were not included in law firm revenues.
    Alexia hadn’t been invited to Baxter and Rena’s wedding, but everybody in town was familiar with the details. Five hundred carefully selected guests from Charleston, Georgetown, Santee, and other areas of the coast came to celebrate the wedding of Ezra Richardson’s younger son. The bride and groom stood under a flower-draped gazebo at the family’s summer house overlooking the