Slings and arrows

It never ceases to amaze me how quickly I forget and need to re-learn lessons I thought I've already taken and gotten a passing grade on.

Lesson 1: God is far better able to handle things than I am.
Lesson 2: After a victory comes a period of testing.
Lesson 3: Letting go is still the best way to handle both.

After the MRI miracle (that's a link to my previous post) - our daughter called the specialist the following morning to book a consultation to discuss the results. They booked it for March 8 - just a little over 2 weeks from the day she called. We felt indeed blessed. 

Doubly so when the surgeon's office called her the FOLLOWING morning to say that they had received the results of the MRI and that they wanted to see her THAT DAY to discuss. Less than 2 days after the MRI!!

The discussion ended with him writing a requisition for surgery and putting on the requisition to place her on the cancellation list - in other words, the sooner this surgery happens (see my post about this on Get Unwrapped!) the better! 

WELL. I forgot lesson 2. 

Flushed with victory, I felt confident enough this morning to invite my daughter to a special service at church this morning led by the children. We enjoy these services because the kids don't just "perform," they MINISTER; they LEAD. Of course it's a bittersweet thing for me because it's something we feel that we will never be able to experience as parents, to have our kids involved in such things. Water under the bridge, too much water under the bridge to go into right now. Suffice to say that their experience of the church is far less stellar than we would have liked. Part of that is our fault in our insistence on rules and such, but another part is the fact that as much as WE were about rules growing up, the church atmosphere was even more so, and they almost always felt shunned by the people who were supposed to love and nurture them. 

Anyway, I thought she might enjoy seeing the kids in charge for a change; they really are wonderful when they lead the service. 

She turned me down flat. Thinking she might be doing so because of how she feels every time she goes to our church (crowded, judged, etc.) I suggested she catch it on UStream.

She made a face - clearly disgusted. "It's about ... God ... isn't it." The way she looked when she said His Name ... like it was the most distasteful thing she'd ever had to say ... cut me to the quick. 

"I ... see your point," I said to her, and walked away numbly - as if I'd been shot - through my soul - with an arrow: one that pierced straight through and that was still there, sticking out at both ends. 

I managed to make it to our bedroom and close the door before the grief overwhelmed me. Wave upon wave of remorse, shame, and sadness washed over the inside of me; I felt like a total and complete failure as a Christian, and as a mother.

My husband, my very best friend in the whole world, held me, let me sob, and then "talked me down." He reminded me of a couple of things I'd already learned ... but forgotten to remember in my sadness and hurt. Lessons one through three, above, to be exact. Plus a number of other things that had to do with letting go and trusting God, that it wasn't my job to rescue her, that she needed to come to Him on her own and I'd spent too much time (pre-recovery) trying to make it happen already (and all that did was have the opposite effect!!)  Without saying it, he reminded me that the Holy Spirit is the Holy Spirit; it's HIS job to bring people into a relationship with God, not mine. 

He let me pray all I could manage to pray (something like, 'Oh Gawwwwwd' - not very imaginative, but heart-felt!) He let me feel what I felt, and he helped me let go ... or start to ... and to trust God for the outcome. He did not judge me; he supported me and held me up when I couldn't hold myself up, and he turned my face toward the Source - until I found my Center again. 

"Two are better than one," the preacher wrote, "because they have a good reward for their labor. For if they fall, one will lift up the other ... and a threefold cord is not quickly broken." (Ecclesiastes 4:9-12)

Have I mentioned that (among other things) I'm so grateful that God in His wisdom and mercy, brought my husband and me together?

Showers of blessing

Mercy-drops 'round us are falling, but for the showers we plead.

While chatting with my husband one morning recently, we were talking about how we both have a tendency to forget the good things God does for us in the everyday, and want to have some sort of "proof" that He cares. We tend not to see the "mercy-drops" all around us. We want - and sometimes I think we truly NEED - those "showers of blessing." 

I suspect I'm not just talking about the two of us. At any rate, I'll just talk about our own experience. 

Lately, we've had a few things happen that have depleted our energy, made us think that maybe we were God's piñata for a while. An unexpected trip to the U.S. - Canadian border last summer, our daughter's knee injury on November 30, 2012, associated expenses to build a ramp and rent a wheelchair, and pay for physiotherapy sessions, plus the increased cost and usage of gasoline with an added driver in the house, all seemed to conspire against us. Not normally optimistic by nature, we saw ourselves as under attack. After the winter weather came, it was like we burrowed into our lives as if to hibernate until the bad things stopped piling up and the snow melted. 

We lurched from appointment to appointment, day to day, gritting our teeth to survive it all, grateful for the minor respites - the mercy-drops - that would happen every so often. When the specialist, over 2 months after our daughter's injury, finally decided that she needed an MRI, we saw a light at the end of the tunnel - only to find out that her date would be in June.

June. Waiting for spring was a symbol of everything we'd been forced to accept the previous few months.   

Yes, that is a patio chair buried in a snow drift on our deck.

It was the spring for which we had been hoping, praying even, for the lack of light and the frigid temperatures, the slippery, treacherous roads, the heavy winter outer clothing, and every single thing about the season, wore at us.

So... it was only fitting that God, with His amazing and somewhat ironic sense of humor, would choose to answer our prayers by using the very thing we both hate with a passion: winter.

The specialist had told us on February 5 that our daughter could ask to be put on a cancellation list - that in the wintertime, she could well be moved up due to people in the country not wanting to chance their safety on the roads, or not being able to get out of their long lanes. For the first time in a long time, I started praying for snow. Not here, necessarily, but just in the country, so that we could get to the hospital if we were called. 

A likely occurrence. NOT. Usually if we get a storm, it blankets the whole Island and nobody can go anywhere.

Every weekend since, we have been inundated with winter storms that have cancelled church services and/or planned family activities. This past weekend, when we finally did get a "snow day" (a work day for me normally), it was already on a provincial holiday, which meant that there would be no cancellations. Our hearts sank. Yet, we just carried on. I would like to say that we carried on patiently. That. Didn't. Happen.

In spite of it all, God provided a shower (or is that a flurry?) of blessing.

This morning, while my husband and daughter were out doing some rare errands before the forecasted snow (and freezing rain, and rain, and more snow) started to fall again, the hospital called with a message that there'd been a cancellation. They missed the call, and they thought that was the end of it. They'd not been home 45 minutes when the hospital called again. The spot was still open for 3 pm; was she interested? 

Uh, YUH!! 

By 4 pm, she was finished her MRI and they were on their way to pick me up from work. That's when they informed me of the other things that happened today as well. She got her handicapped placard for the vehicle (this after hubby had been ticketed for parking in a handicapped zone and contacted city hall to explain - they waived the ticket and suggested he contact the local Council for Persons with Disabilities to get a temporary permit), she paid her health care insurance premiums so that she would be covered while off on sick benefits, and they went to a few stores and stocked up on some supplies - all good things to take place - before the storm that was threatening hit our area. 

Now, we are settled in for the evening, the snow is falling and we are enjoying each other's company. In winter. Hmm.

And I'm feeling grateful, and relieved, and .. rather (suitably) sheepish.

When I am weak

I was reading in a devotional book just recently and it quoted Ole Hallesby when talking about prayer: "Prayer and helplessness are inseparable. Only those who are helpless can truly pray . . . . Your helplessness is your best prayer." 

I've been around people who think that "coming boldly before the throne of grace" (Heb. 4:16) means to come brazenly. They think that prayer is all about getting what they want by manipulating God into doing it, that it's their right as children to get whatever they ask for if only they'll believe strongly enough. 

If my child wanted an AK47, and boldly asked for it, it wouldn't matter how much that child wheedled, cried, threw tantrums, or kept me up nights asking for it - I would not give my child such an instrument of death. I use this merely as an example using "hyperbole" - an extreme exaggeration.

At some point, each of us must realize that there are some things that we don't know, and that God does. He sees the end from the beginning; we don't. So it's best to ASK. Not demand, not throw Christian tantrums, not flail around and yell, or do whatever it is we do to try to twist God's arm. 

We are the powerless ones. He has all power. He is Large and In Charge - and there is not one thing that we can do for ourselves. Not One Thing. 

It is when we realize and accept our own helplessness, our own inability to change the outcome, that we can approach God with the right attitude. 

Often, we pray and ask God for some desired outcome and He takes us through something we never would have wanted to bring us to ... not only that outcome, but better than we had ever dreamed. Since He is eternal and lives in the eternal "now" - He can see both sides of the door; we only see the one ... until AFTER we go through it and see the other side (and remember what the other side was like).  

Image "Sleeping Infant" by Dynamite Imagery
courtesy of freedigitalphotos.net

It's very much like the age-old paradox of free will and predestination, which I see as the door through which we are invited, through our choice, to come into relationship with Him. On that side of the door, written on the lintel, is "Whosoever will." When we make the choice and walk through that door, we can look back on it and see that the writing over the other side is different: "Chosen in Him before the foundation of the world." It is not contradictory; it is complimentary.

A lot of things are like that in the Christian life. Lose your life to gain it. Give and it will be given to you. Happy are you if you mourn. 

However, it's the reality of our helplessness that is at the crux of it. God is intensely drawn to the desperation that arises in our hearts when we are convinced of our own powerlessness, when we realize that there is nothing at all that we can do, that He holds all the cards. When we call out to Him in our weakness, that is when He can demonstrate His strength. If we try to rely on our own limited resources and depend on our own human machinations, it doesn't work. Letting go is the only way for His power to show up in us and for us in ways that will simply amaze us and cause us to give Him all the credit, spur us to deep gratitude and a deep desire to please Him.

He is the source, the substance, and the satisfaction of all those desires.