It seems like in that millisecond where a nurse’s voice echoed “Code Blue” over the hospital intercom, the world became something very unfamiliar to me. My footing seemed unsure, and God seemed unreachable.
I wish I could say everything turned around overnight. Well, I guess in a way it did – if you look at the last 3 months as the longest night. There’s been a heaviness, a literal darkness, that has held heavy on my soul and tired my body down to a point of weakness I never thought I’d know in this lifetime. I had to answer some tough questions about faith, and more personally, God.
Don’t get me wrong. It was never a question of whether or not I believed in God. It was whether or not I believed God believed in me. And I think that’s what I’ve wrestled with most in writing this blog, in getting up the next morning, and learning to laugh and live again. It’s intensely challenging to show God’s love when you’re not necessarily feeling it yourself at the moment. And that moment lingers.
But that’s the key, isn’t it? When we become so enshrouded with the awareness of just ourselves, we don’t see the pain surrounding us and the opportunity to extend love, or at the very least kindness, to the mad world around us. Once we do extend love, we not only begin to feel better about ourselves, but we begin again to “feel” God (not that God is to be felt, so much as believed in – faith is much more than an emotion – in fact, it’s usually just the opposite, but I digress).
“There will come a time when each and every one of us will look on our lives from the vantage point of eternity and see that our entire lifetime was just a moment to God, a mere breath. So was our suffering. Then we will look on the rewards that have been stored up for us, rewards for our faithfulness as stewards of the heavy talents of suffering that were entrusted to us. And we will be startled to see that the exchange rate of heaven is not measured out to us pound for pound because the thumb of a generous God is on those scales, weighting them in our favor.” – Ken Gire, The North Face of God
We all know the Wild Bill of the saloons and the quick draws. But there is another Wild Bill whose character demands greater fame than his namesake. George G. Ritchie Jr. And Elizabeth Sherrill talk about this Wild Bill in their book, Return from Tomorrow. Wild Bill was a Jewish prisoner during the holocaust. Loving as he was calm under pressure, he became a valuable asset to everyone in the camp – to and including the German guards. He worked tirelessly in cooperation with the German soldiers as a problem solver and peacemaker between the clashing ethnic groups. With several languages at his command and the understanding of a 100-year old sage, it is hard to imagine the reality of his beginnings. He watched as his wife and 5 children were slain right in front of him years earlier. When asked why he was helping and doing what he was doing, he calmly replied:
“Hate had just killed the six people who mattered most to me in the world. I decided then that I would spend the rest of my life – whether it was a few days or many years – loving every person I came in contact with.”
And I suppose that’s where I’m at with God and my place in this world. I could hate God. I could hate the hospital. I could hate this journey that I’ve been put on. And I guarantee, if I did that, I would begin to hate myself. Thornton Wilder, in The Angel That Troubled the Waters, says it perfectly for me. “In love’s service, only the wounded soldiers can serve”.
I’m not out of the woods yet. In fact you might have caught in my last post that my being able to keep Ryan’s liver is still in question. That’s a blow to not only my spirit, but to so many family and friends and yes, you.
We don’t know yet, but we find ourselves still hoping. And the fact that hope can still rise to the top is a result of a tried and tested faith that defies our human tendencies.
And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love. – 1 Corinthians 13:13.