Another Year

Unsure of my words. For a person who has spent the majority of her life being an avid talker and one who had to learn to listen (and often still offends in this way), being unsure of my words is a fairly new sensation. It started happening about 4 years ago and has only increased in frequency. Thelo just celebrated his fourth trip around the sun at the end of June. I spend his birthdays staring at him with immense and unspeakable gratitude to the One who made him. Mingled with this gratitude, inseparable; forever fused is, sorrow. Sorrow for what has already happened and sinful sorrow about what tomorrow will hold. I know that each day has its own trouble and I need not ponder tomorrow with contempt, but “future” doesn’t have the same allure it once had for me. As Thelo has gotten older, people have correctly reminded me that his life and struggles aren’t all about me. It’s about him. It’s his life, his sorrow, his struggle, his joys, his triumphs, and his faith.

This self-centered gratitude and sorrow combination are often what leaves me with my mouth shut. My mom always taught me, “If you can’t say something nice, then shut up.” (This phrase was more nicely stated when I was young, but it evolved and became more, um, “direct” as we grew up.) I often find myself with nothing nice to say, nothing eloquent to write, so in the blogging sphere, I’ve been silent for over a year.

My handsome little man.

A couple months ago, Thelo gave himself to Jesus. It was a moment in time, leaving Food Lion with all four kids in tow, that he looked up from his perch in the grocery cart, and asked me a question I can’t recall. Though, my response defaulted to the same statement and question I had asked him occasionally for the last 6 months. “Well, first you have to admit that you’ve done something wrong in order to ask God for forgiveness. Have you ever done anything wrong?” Until that moment, he had always given me a cheeky sideways grin and reply, “Nope,” with nothing but assurance. This particular moment, he looked off and calmly said, “Yes, I’ve done wrong.” Surprised, I think I chuckled. “Oh yeah?” I said, smiling. “Well, then you would have to ask God to forgive you… IF you think Jesus dying and taking your place was enough.” It’s not that I was trying to shut him down or that I want to make a child believe that salvation is too complicated for them, but they need to understand that it is an important decision they are making for themselves. And since I can’t make the decision for them, I don’t want to coax it out or placate them with feelings of misdirected accomplishment. Salvation isn’t some prize to be won so that they can have my approval. “I did,” came his simple reply. “You did? You asked God to forgive you?” “Yep,” he said confidently. “Did He forgive you?” I challenged. “Yep, He forgave me,” he emphasized. “Well, then you’re His and His Spirit lives inside you!” The conversation was finished before we had made it to the car. As I drove home, I asked the Lord to make it true. That his faith would only grow, that the Lord would take him through his life, comforting and providing for him in ways that I won’t be able to.

As Thelo’s physical heart function continued to improve, the urgency of his salvation highlighted my prayers. I know it might sound crazy to ask God to save my three year old, but God did. As his heart has continued to heal since coming back to the US from South Africa in 2015, his third open-heart surgery suddenly popped into view on the horizon. Warily looking forward to Thelo’s pre-surgical heart cath and MRI at the end of this past April, I had a tumultuous journey with the Lord. One night, blind rage folded in over me like a wave for what felt like hours of struggling with the Lord. When I came up for air, had only been 15 minutes. My hope was restored and my feet found solid ground as I begged the Lord for the salvation of staff at Duke and salvation for my son as he was preparing to embark on his own painful and complicated journey as a much more aware child with congenital heart disease. I knew Thelo was growing up and will soon begin to own his heart disease, I asked that the Lord go with him.

In the process of dealing with my own grief, I picked up two books by C. S. Lewis. One called The Problem of Pain and the other, A Grief Observed. They are both small writings, but I have taken great lengths of time to wade through the content, making it only three quarters of the way through the one about the grief he experienced during and after the loss of his wife to cancer. What I have found so refreshing about this book is that it was originally published under a pseudonym because it was simply the unrefined musings and groanings he had scribbled in a personal journal. Because of its origins, it is profoundly honest and often contradictory as a person in grief often is when going through suffering. Lewis, a man of faith, makes no great leap as he connects the relationship between physical and spiritual. This truth pushed him again to the solid ground of God’s goodness and faithfulness amid the reality of God’s loving infliction of severe spiritual and physical suffering (even when we can’t divine its purpose). When talking about the character of a God who inflicts such suffering, he explains it like this,

“The terrible thing is that a perfectly good God is in this matter hardly less formidable than a Cosmic Sadist. The more we believe that God hurts only to heal, the less we can believe that there is any use in begging for tenderness. A cruel man might be bribed – might grow tired of his vile sport – might have a temporary fit of mercy, as alcoholics have fits of sobriety. But suppose that what you are up against is a surgeon whose intentions are wholly good. The kinder and more conscientious he is, the more inexorably he will go on cutting. If he yielded to your entreaties, if he stopped before the operation was complete, all the pain up to that point would have been useless. But is it credible that such extremities of torture should be necessary for us? Well, take your choice. The tortures occur. If they are unnecessary, then there is no God or a bad one. If there is a good God, then these tortures are necessary. For no even moderately good Being could possibly inflict or permit them if they weren’t. Either way, we’re in for it. What do people mean when they say, ‘I am not afraid of God because I know He is good?’ Have they never even been to a dentist?”

Lewis goes on to have inexplicable return of joy the following morning. His pain would continue as he grieved. He would not forget the sorrow of watching his wife waste away in pain and be overtaken by death, experiencing separately her own suffering and grief, but his perspective had shifted.

What I continue to be amazed and thankful for is that God’s spiritual, surgical intervention into my heart is not unique to me. He intervenes on behalf of all those who come to know Him as their Lord and Savior. This also means that His incomparable comfort comes to those who wait on Him as well. Thelo may not ask his cardiologist why he was made this way. He may not scream at his surgeon, “Why are you hurting me?!” Why would he ask them? His cardiologist didn’t fashion his heart; he only studies and monitors its delicate condition. His surgeon wouldn’t intend to torture him, but only attempt to better his life. Instead, Thelo will ask these questions to the One who can answer: God. Amazingly, the God that hears and answers is the same One who has rescued Thelo’s soul and sealed him for all eternity. No matter what.

 

Please keep our family in mind as we approach this surgery on August 24th*, 2017. Keep Thelo in mind as he learns what it means to trust in the Lord. His faith is so new, but that doesn’t mean it must be weak. Pray for those who will be attending to his and our family’s needs. Pray for opportunities people will have to respond to the Good News of Jesus Christ.

*This date was changed from July 27th to August 9th, and then to August 24th.  The first change was made in order to accommodate the urgent surgical needs of other patients.  This second change is due to a respiratory illness (a.k.a. cold) Thelo picked up last week at VBS.  The pushing back of his surgical date will hopefully allow for complete resolution of his virus and put him in the best condition for surgery.  Thanks for continuing to pray.

Murmurings from South Africa.

04/22/15

I’ve been having opportunities to watch the “difficult” play out in people’s lives. My investment is shallow. I don’t know them very well. Their versions are one-sided. My versions of my story are one-sided, too. Heck, if even our language couple can’t decide on the best way to say, “I’m thirsty,” how can any of us hope to reconcile the two sides of a multi-faceted life-storyline? Today I got to talk with Heather about painting. The old stuff. Art college days. As I chatted with her about it, I remembered inwardly the battles that would go on during in-class critiques of each others’ works. How students who didn’t paint portraits would get so upset about another student that would depict a person a certain way, sometimes in seemingly cliché ways.

Remember those amazing sheet/dream paintings? Life-sized portraits of sleeping people with their actual bedsheets as the canvas. Man, how I loved those! They were so intimate. A moment in time, captured by the artist, depicting the deep sleep of people and their inward thoughts/dreams, as he imagined them.

What made these paintings seem cliché at the moment was the fact that there was a painting of an Indian woman which showed primitive drawings floating through her dreams. Despite the negative comments, I immediately connected in my mind: “This guy must have a deep and meaningful relationship with this woman. She allowed him to observe her at the peak of vulnerability. He’s not just any artist, he is a trusted friend.” As a friend observing an intimate and personal moment, he painted what was most important to her. To others, he was a stranger gawking on a brown, sleeping woman and he simplified and objectified her by painting her juxtaposed with stereotypical images of things that went with her brown skin. It was shocking to me, the lack of insight and hairline depth of their interpretation. He had painted her sleeping among those images, because he knew those images mattered to her. His intimate knowledge of her made those images meaningful, even if those dissecting his painting didn’t have a clue.

So, here I sit, 3 cups of coffee into thoughts about my own limited observations of real peoples’ lives. I don’t really know them. God knows, I’ll never deeply understand them. As simply a person created in God’s image, it’s literally impossible to delve into the hearts and minds of people created in God’s image. We are a reflection, folks. Apart from reflections, we don’t even see our own faces, let alone the struggles, joys, and beliefs of the inner person.

People love those Dove commercials that make the case for treating ourselves as valuable and seeing ourselves as beautiful. It’s all the rage to try and lift each other out of the mire of Facebook/Twitter comments and blog post commenters who seek to destroy anyone that doesn’t live up to the haughty standards they feel everyone should be living up to (even if they themselves don’t abide by their own standards). But why? A secular society, who continually distance themselves from God, seek to find internal and external value beyond their outward appearance and cheer for those trying to do the same. But, aside from voiced and typed thoughts, all we know of each other is an outward appearance. A mixture of signals received by the eye and interpreted by the brain. What are people or their opinions worth?

Immediately, my mind races to the subject of “population control” and all the turning of humanity’s focus to the number of people in the world versus the number of resources available for sustaining said population. Those who feel we are being “irresponsible” by allowing more and more people to overtake the earth write their opinions juxtaposed with images of human sprawl. Shanties, poverty, pollution, etc. It’s like taking a mass of unknown, unknowable, and unimportant humans and drawing math equations to show they have no value. Area + people + pollution = “Not cool.” (According to Ashton Kutcher.) Take out “area” and “pollution” and what you end up with is people = not cool. What are we doing?? If my heart can be overwhelmed by the depth of a single person, who am I to say people I’ve not even met have no value? Or their future offspring? I can’t just post pictures of empty and vast fields and valleys and drum up this conclusion: “world half empty, divide and conquer.” Either conclusion turns people and the earth into shallow game pieces that can be rearranged to satisfy personal opinions.

Ultimately, our opinion about it doesn’t amount to anything. My opinions about heartache heard though ears coming from one-sided mouths, doesn’t amount to much. Class critiques on a guy’s paintings usually don’t illicit the value of the experiences he’s had in the relationships with his willing subjects. It’s personal and it’s largely invisible. To quote a Sara Groves song, “Who can know the pain, the joy, the regret, the satisfaction? Who can know the love of one life, one heart, one soul, until you’re at abstraction?” (Abstraction) Why does it matter if I think I’m beautiful and why does Dove care? Why does it matter that mean people say nasty things to a woman who blogs about fitness? Why get offended if a man paints a brown woman next to cave paintings? Why tell a mom of six boys that she’s being irresponsible for having a seventh child that happens to be a girl? Why look at population sprawl and think it’s a shame there are so many people living? Why do I care about a person’s disadvantages in life and the good or bad decisions they have made on top of it all? Why care when a virtual stranger’s marriage is falling apart? Why not care? Why care?

Where is the baseline? Does it exist? It does. The baseline, the starting point, it’s the Person responsible for my beauty, my friend’s sorrow, that guy’s artistic talent, those peoples’ poor interpretation skills, that mom’s love of her children, all those people living in jaw-dropping sprawl, and the demise of a person’s marriage. He doesn’t just know about these things. These things didn’t just happen to people. He made this world and everything in it, He even planned it all out before He laid the foundations of this earth and before He filled it with amazing resources. He made the earth, filled it, and then made us. People. He made us in His image. THAT gives us value. Jesus gave us value, His value. When the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit planned all things, He planned us and made us image-bearers. He loved us. I won’t get into sin right now, nor the consequences of it, but I do know that all of it, ALL OF IT, was planned and has been implemented with precision. He knew we would push Him away. He knew that when we did, we would forget that we are made in His image. We would prioritize ourselves over others like ourselves. He knew we would live selfishly and shallowly, serving and worshiping ourselves at the detriment to everything around us: our resources, our planet, each other, and our unborn. That we would devise ways to make our lives convenient, even if it meant hiding our trash. That we would even kill our own children to put off personal responsibility. To the point of crunching numbers to figure out a way to keep humanity small and our resources big (as if those two things are exclusive of each other). In prioritizing creation above Creator, resources over image-bearers… what do we accomplish?

We accomplish NOTHING. We submit and surrender ourselves to our half-baked plans for saving ourselves and creation and end up with nothing. Empty hands, broken hearts, a groaning earth, and a lot of dead people. In seeking self deliverance, we acquire eternal damnation.

Does Jesus have a plan for all those people in those sprawling photos? Does He have a plan for my friend who has suffered so much? Yes. Will He deliver them all, rescuing them in His eternal salvation through the sacrifice and resurrection of Jesus Christ? No. He won’t. Do I understand that? No, I don’t. Do I have to understand it in order for His purposes and ethics to be good? No. My perception and comprehension of His plan doesn’t make His plan good. My thoughts on my own appearance doesn’t make me more or less beautiful, sorry Dove. My interpretation of a friend’s choices, even if I can offer good advice based on those interpretations, won’t actually speak to the depths of it that I will never know, because I’m not her. Ashton Kutcher’s opinion about the need for population control can not take away the value of those people because God made them valuable even if Ashton disagrees. God’s plan is good, and there is nothing you and I can do about it. It’s impossible for us to grasp it, but all those things that I mentioned above, they matter because people matter, and people matter because people matter to God.

It all comes back to Him. It comes to this: Are you His? Have you surrendered to Him? Are you His child, or are you His enemy? We are all made in His image, but we all need to be born again into His salvation. We are loved as we are, still in our sin, but we are not good enough to stay that way. We have to be born once, into death, and born again into life. Everlasting life. In salvation, the circumstances of our friends lives may not change. With Jesus, the lifestyle of poverty lived by those people in those photos may not change. This is a harsh reality here on earth. But, what does change is their eternity. With God, nothing is impossible. What effect does hope have on a mass of hopeless people? Even population-poster-boy would agree that hope changes a lot of things. My prayer is for every person on this planet to hear about the greatest Hope that ever walked the earth, Jesus Christ. That their ears and eyes would be opened to the only Truth that can save us all.

This is us.