A/N: See Chapter 1 for Disclaimer.

Chapter 3: Eternity

"Unbelievable, Richard," Hyacinth said quietly as she and her husband were sitting together at their kitchen table later on that night. "This whole disaster is simply unbelievable. I don't know what to make of all of this. I don't understand. It doesn't make any sense. Elizabeth has a heart attack and she doesn't tell me. Elizabeth puts her safety, even her life, at risk, for this women's shelter, and she doesn't tell me. It's as if she's got this crazy sort of secret life in which she's a completely different person. It's like I don't even know her."

"Forgive me for saying this, Hyacinth, but in reality, you never truly knew Elizabeth because you never actually tried to get to know her."

"What on earth are you talking about?"

Under normal circumstances, Richard Bucket would never dare to speak to Hyacinth this way, but now, with Elizabeth's life suddenly hanging in the balance, a whole new kind of boldness he'd never experienced before began coursing through his veins, and he could no longer hold back all the words and emotions that had remained unexpressed for years.

"Hyacinth, in all our years of marriage, I always walk on eggshells around you, because I know that if I dare to say the wrong thing, it'll start up a big argument. But now, with Elizabeth lying unconscious in the ICU, fighting for her life, I don't care anymore, and I'm going to tell you the cold, hard truth about yourself whether you like it or not. And here's the truth, Hyacinth. Whenever anyone tries to have a conversation with you, nine times out of ten, it's just like talking to a brick wall. You never listen. You constantly do all the talking while the other person always has to do all the listening. Almost all of your relationships are like that, and no relationship in which one person constantly does all the talking and none of the listening is healthy. You are far too self-absorbed. From the first moment you open your eyes in the morning till the moment you close your eyes to go to sleep at night, the main thought on your mind is always you. What your plans and desires are for the day. What scheme you want to conscript Elizabeth and me and other poor souls into to help you climb the social ladder. You, you, you. That is literally the only thing you ever think about most of the time."

"That is not true, Richard Bouquet, and I demand an apology from you right now!"

"Well, that's tough, Hyacinth, because you aren't going to get one. And the reason why you're not getting any apologies from me tonight is because every last word I said to you just now is the truth, and somewhere deep down underneath all of your pride, I do believe there is a tiny part of you that knows I'm telling you the truth. As a matter of fact, I can prove it to you."

"How?"

"When we came home from the hospital a few minutes ago and sat down here together at our kitchen table, on the day that our friend, who's lived next door to us and been a very good friend to us for many years now, goes into cardiac arrest – cardiac arrest, Hyacinth – what are the first words that come out of your mouth? What is the first thing you talk about? What is the first thing that comes to your mind? What is the first thing you're concerned about? Is it Elizabeth? No. It's you. The very first thing you think about is how offended you feel that Elizabeth kept some secrets from you. Your first concern, and really, your only concern, is how Elizabeth's medical crisis affects you and makes you feel, not how Elizabeth is doing and whether or not Elizabeth is going to be okay.

"Elizabeth is just a worker bee in your eyes, Hyacinth, nothing more. Just a worker bee for you to use to help you climb the social ladder. That's all she's ever been to you. Elizabeth has always been a friend to you, an amazing friend to you, but you, my queen bee of a wife, were never really a friend to her. Every single time you ever talk to her, it's always about you and what you want Elizabeth to do for you. I don't think I've ever once heard you ask Elizabeth how her day was going or about what's going on in her life. Not once, Hyacinth, in all these years. So you can't get all offended and be so shocked that Elizabeth never felt comfortable enough with you to confide in you about her heart problems or her desire to help abused women and children. You can't blame anybody for that but you.

"And now, that basically leaves you with two choices, Hyacinth. You can either choose to cling to your pride, get angry at me for telling you the cold, hard truth about yourself for once in our marriage, and waste what precious little time your only friend could have left on this earth feeling sorry for yourself. Or, you can choose to humble yourself, admit what a selfish person you've been all this time, and start finally being there for Elizabeth and start finally being a real friend to her that she can trust and depend on during her greatest hour of need. The choice is yours."

Richard then got up from his seat and left the Queen Bee alone in the kitchen with her thoughts.

Elizabeth clung to life over the next two days, and finally, her condition began to improve some. While Hyacinth and all of Elizabeth's friends and acquaintances from church were not allowed to visit her in the ICU, her brother Emmet and her daughter Gail were constantly by her side. And when Elizabeth started regaining consciousness at last during the second night of her stay in the ICU, they were both right there. Naturally, Elizabeth expressed how very much she wanted to see Daisy and Rose so that she could thank them for performing CPR and saving her life, and after Emmet and Gail spoke with the nurses about it, they bent the rules and allowed the two sisters to come and see her the following morning, although Hyacinth was (understandably) blacklisted for the time being.

When Daisy and Rose came into Elizabeth's small room in the ICU at about eleven-thirty that morning, Elizabeth was sitting up in bed receiving oxygen from a nasal canula, and with an I.V. in her arm, hooked up to a heart monitor. While waiting for the two sisters to arrive, Elizabeth had drifted off to sleep, and as soon as Daisy lightly knocked on the door and came inside with Rose, Emmet whispered Elizabeth's name in her ear and stroked the top of her head, trying to bring her out of sleep as gently as possible.

"Hi," Emmet lovingly whispered when Elizabeth opened her eyes. "You've got visitors."

Emmet then stepped aside and let Daisy and Rose come up to Elizabeth's bedside. Daisy sat down in the chair on Elizabeth's left, where Emmet had previously been sitting, and Gail got out of her chair on the other side of the bed so that Rose could sit there.

"I'm going to go out for a little walk," Gail told them.

"Alright, dear," said Emmet, and then Gail left.

"There she is," Daisy said with such warmth in her voice as she took Elizabeth's hand in her own. "There's the angel we've all been missing so much."

In that moment, Liz shook her head at Daisy slightly, and told her, "I'm not the angel, here, Daisy. You and Rose are the angels. I wouldn't even be here now if it weren't for the two of you. And I want you both to know how grateful I am for everything you did. I'll always be so grateful. Thank you."

"And we'll always be so grateful to you for coming back to us," Daisy said in the same warm tone.

"That's right," Rose agreed. "You know, love, Daisy, Onslow, and me, we're not usually very religious people, but now, we all just can't stop thanking God that you're awake and that you're getting better."

"Thank you," said Liz.

"I know how you feel, Rose," said Emmet. "I've been distant from Christ for a long time now, but over the past couple of days, I've been praying nonstop."

"You know, when Emmet and I were little, our grandmother…well, she was a wonderful lady. She was the living, breathing definition of what a true follower of Jesus Christ should be. We don't like to advertise this, but our parents…they weren't exactly the most loving parents in the world. They…they really put Emmet and me through a lot as we were growing up. It was kind of a miracle that we even survived our childhood. But our Grandma Nina, our father's mother, she always showered us with love. And she taught us the gospel, the Scriptures. She taught us about the Lord. But the best lessons she taught were in the way she lived. In the way she treated people, especially little children. If not for her, Emmet and I probably wouldn't have survived our childhood."

"I'm sorry, love," Daisy said sincerely. "I'm so very sorry. No one should ever have their childhood stolen by an abuser. No one."

"Well, thanks to our grandmother, it wasn't stolen completely. And as I said, she was the living definition of everything a Christian should be. She was the sweetest, most gentle, most humble, most selfless human being I've ever known. And when she taught Emmet and me about the gospel as little children, naturally, we prayed with her and put our faith in Jesus. But then when we lost her in our teen years, I couldn't even bear to walk inside a church building for the longest time, because being inside a church always reminded me of her. And I drifted away from Jesus. I was so hurt and angry at Him for taking the one light Emmet and I had in our lives away from us. I stayed angry at Him and I stayed distant from Him for many years, but when I had that heart attack last year, it really woke me up. It made me realize just how fragile our lives actually are. Anything can happen to any of us at any time. No one is promised tomorrow. And nothing is more important than knowing where you stand with God and where you'll be spending eternity. After that wake-up call I got last year, I started actually taking my faith in Christ seriously again, and I'm so glad I did."

"My husband Onslow's always been an atheist, but from time to time, I'll remind him of something an old friend of mine, who passed on many years ago, once told me: it's easy to be an atheist when you're healthy and you think you have decades of life left in you, but when you find yourself at death's door, you no longer have the luxury of atheism."

"Are you a believer, Daisy?" Elizabeth asked with great curiosity.

"I'm not what you would call a 'born-again' believer in Jesus Christ. But I do believe there is a God who created the world. Frankly, it boggles my mind that people can look at mountains and oceans and sunrises and sunsets and at pictures of all these planets and galaxies in outer space and think that there isn't a God; that it all just somehow got thrown together by some big cosmic accident. That whole idea is utterly ridiculous. But I just can't bring myself to do the whole Christianity thing, because I've seen countless Christians over the years being as self-righteous and obnoxious as my sister Hyacinth, and I don't want to become that kind of a person. But if I could become the kind of Christian your grandmother was, the kind of Christian you are, who only cares about helping others and constantly does so in secret, without making a big show about it, I think I would consider it."

Elizabeth nodded, and she told Daisy, "Sadly, there are so many modern-day Pharisees in this world, falsely claiming the name of Christ without understanding anything about the gospel or about who Jesus actually is. They try to turn Christianity into this dreary list of rules, but it's not that. It's simply about having a relationship with our Heavenly Father through Christ."

"I'm no Bible scholar, but doesn't it say somewhere in the Bible that you're supposed to carry your cross and follow Jesus?"

"Yes, but when Jesus says that, He's not talking about being saved from eternal punishment for our sins in hell. He's talking about discipleship. That's something our grandmother really drilled into our heads as we were growing up. You see, Daisy, salvation, or eternal life, is not something that any of us can ever earn ourselves, and it is not ever an earned reward for living a Godly life like so many modern-day Pharisees would have us to believe. It's a gift from Almighty God that is one hundred percent free and undeserved, that we receive solely by trusting in Jesus, in His shed blood at the cross on our behalf to pay for all of our sins. There are so many professing Christians out there who are constantly saying that we have to repent of our sins to be saved, but that is absolutely not true, and it is, in fact, a very clever and subtle way that Satan, himself, corrupts the message of the gospel by combining faith and works. We don't repent of our sins to be saved, Daisy. What we repent of to be saved is unbelief. After coming to faith in Christ, then we must choose for ourselves how to live. We can choose to disobey Christ's call to carry our cross and follow Him as one of His disciples, and we can choose to continue living for ourselves, but if we do that, we open ourselves up to the possibility of being chastised by the Lord, just as any earthly father must discipline a disobedient child, and we lose whatever eternal rewards we could have earned through our obedience to Christ. But we never lose our salvation if we've trusted in Christ's perfect sacrifice to pay for all our sins, because it was always a free gift from God. Always. And living as a disciple of Christ isn't obeying a dreary list of dos and don'ts in order to earn His approval. Once we come to faith in Christ, we already have His love and approval forever. No, discipleship is choosing to live a life of service, of putting Christ and others ahead of yourself in everything.

"And God may ask some hard things of us at times – very hard things, even – but if He does, it's never to be cruel. It's always because it's in our long-term best interests and the best interests of others. God is always looking out for His children, Daisy, and He's never against His children any more than you or I could be against our children. Life isn't always going to go our way – as a matter of fact, it very often doesn't – but it's never because God doesn't care. In fact, it's just the opposite. If we always had everything we ever wanted all the time, without any pain or problems or challenges, we'd all be a bunch of shallow, spoiled brats without any character, and we wouldn't be able to appreciate anything good that we had. God certainly isn't the author of sin or evil. He never causes anyone to sin or hurt others, but because He did give us free will and the ability to think and choose for ourselves how we're going to live and treat others, people are going to make selfish and sinful choices at times. That's just how it works in a world with free will. God doesn't like it any more than we do when suffering happens as a result of sinful choices, but God isn't going to override our ability to think and choose for ourselves and He isn't going to force His will upon anyone, because if He did that, it would be an act of spiritual rape."

"You know, I've often wondered how a God who's supposed to love the world so much that He gave His only begotten Son to save it could actually allow so much evil to exist. But the way you explained it all just now…it really makes a lot of sense," Daisy told Elizabeth as some major spiritual light bulbs came on in both hers and Rose's heads.

"I think so, too," Rose agreed. "Say, Liz, do you really think we can be born again without becoming like Hyacinth?"

Elizabeth and Emmet chuckled, and Elizabeth replied, "Absolutely, Rose. Absolutely. As a disciple of Christ, Jesus will want you to give up your sin, but He'll never want or expect you to stop being yourself. Jesus made you the way you are on purpose, and He loves you for who you are, Rose. He loves you dearly." Elizabeth then turned her glance to Daisy and said, "Both of you."

And with that, Daisy and Rose bowed their heads in prayer with Elizabeth and Emmet, and they both came to faith in Christ. Just a few short days ago, neither one of them would have dreamed of doing such a thing. But having to perform CPR on Elizabeth and literally come face to face with mortality itself had an extremely deep impact on both of them, and now, they both were ready, more than ready, to have peace with God through Christ and know, beyond a doubt, where they would be spending eternity.