Lately my best thinking times are when I’m rocking Riley to
sleep and sitting at church. It seems these two times are when my heart is the stillest;
my mind is open, yet shuffling through all the pages of my life. At church I get
inspired get to feel the holy spirit send chills through my skin, at night
putting Riley to sleep I get to reflect on the day, and it’s in the rocker that
I feel like my thoughts start like a flip book, slow at first and then they get
faster and the images start to go so fast I can’t even make out the picture.
Do you ever feel like that in life?
You know I’ve said it before that having Riley and staying home
was a struggle for me. I graduated in
2009 with a degree in Journalism, and it just was not sitting well with me to
stay home and pay off a degree I was not using.
Yet I couldn’t bear the thought of someone else raising Riley.
2 days after Riley was born my family drove up from North
Carolina. My brother Taylor was here and he got really sick while here. I remember
thinking how can he be so sick? I just gave birth and had my vagina stitched up
and now I got to get this baby to nurse… PLEASE… His cramps can be nothing
compared to labor... He was bent over our kitchen table moaning in pain in his
stomach. Then he started vomiting. I told my thoughts to calm down a bit... I
also had those heavy hormones on my side.
It’s crazy how quick we are to compare isn’t it?
He stayed for a few more days then surprisingly took a train
over to Utica to visit friends for a few days then took the train back to NC.
Taylor is a
photographer… it’s his God given talent... He had brought his camera with him
and it got left on the train and it was gone. (You can check out his pics here)
It is now symbolic to
me in a way. He’s still sick, more than
a year later he has a mystery illness, he’s lost his entire large intestine, a
foot of his small intestine, his bladder, and damage to one testicle that his
him shivering if he’ll ever be able to have kids. He’s been to a number of different hospitals,
including Cleveland Clinic. He’s meet hundreds of nurses, he’s been tested and
poked and scanned to many times. The hospital
bills have flooded my parent’s house. Exhaustion has become too close of a
friend in their home.
Losing that camera was just the beginning to all the
physical things he was about to lose. I’ve
never had to deal with hospitals. My family was always so healthy this was a
new experience. While Taylor was in the hospital
I was beside myself, with a newborn and a brother that I was scared was going
to die. I used to have dreams about him,
in the hospital and as ghosts because he had died. He said he had dreams about
dying...
He was close to death… yet he was saved.
Through this tragic
event I didn’t know what else to do besides dig in to the bible every day. It
was the only thing giving me strength. I felt so alone, I couldn’t be there to
see Taylor, I couldn’t be there to hug my mom, I couldn’t be there to explain
to my 13 year old brother what was going
on. I couldn’t share in my frustrations of being a new mom; I couldn’t share
with my family the daily joys of Riley. Yet alone, try to give my husband the
woman I was before I was so weighed down with worry, anxiety, etc.
I got to visit my brother 3 times last year. I flew with a 2
month old and had to bring a nebulizer, she was so sick. I was scared to death,
but I HAD To be there for Taylor.
It was such a
blessing that I was not working because being there meant so much to me.
Through his sickness I got closer to God, and was able to understand purpose in
life. A book that really moved me was The Me I want to be, by John Ortberg too.
We have had a year of doctors seeming hopeless, wondering
what is the purpose in all this, and through reading the bible I was able to
hear Gods loving whisper of “I got this.” It was not easy to hear and to
remember when he would get worse and there were not any answers.
See that’s the thing, there is sin in this world. God hates
sin, so he is there for us to get us through all the crap that tries to suck us
down under. There is Good vs. evil. Yet
God has promised to never forsake us, he created us, he knows our deepest
desires, he knows our hearts, so it only makes sense to turn to him for comfort
in times of uncertainty. For some it’s hard to get past the anger and
blame.
But God didn’t make my brother get sick. God didn’t force the doctors to cut out
almost his whole digestive system. But God was there with him, God was listening
to everyone around this country who was and is praying for him. God loves him.
God loves you. He will take our
situations and turn them around, but we have to trust and believe.
So HOW DO WE KNOW WHAT GOD WANTS US TO DO WHEN WE DON’T KNOW
WHAT WE WANT TO DO? Read the Bible. Spend time with God. Wait and listen. Pray for understanding. The coolest thing about the Bible is there is
an answer for everything, sometimes we overlook it because it’s not the answer
we want. When pain is controlling your
body it’s easy to rest in blame, bitterness starts to form nicely around our
bodies, and sometimes reading the bible makes us look in the mirror, and say
“It’s
not you God, it’s me.”
Hope. Hope Hope. The
world we live in is nasty, full of destructiveness. But hope, can change
everything. God’s grace will change everything. Not sure how you feel about anything today?
Grab a bible, look up verses on Google. Just start. Seek, and you shall find.
You can check these out- Psalm 37:4, Exodus 33:13, and Psalm
71:8
Acts 17- Gods word reclaims our hearts and minds.
