This is Trauma

This is trauma. May/June of 2012 I almost lost my husband to a hemorrhage in his stomach. What had already been a difficult time at a missionary training facility, turned into a nightmare one afternoon. Jay had already been feeling crummy after taking typhoid immunity medication, but so had a couple other people. He spent one night regretting having eaten an entire hamburger at dinner, experiencing vomit-worthy reflux which kept him from sleeping. He was just as miserable the following day, only eating because our schedule demanded we eat at specific times. He assumed he would feel hungry eventually and didn’t want to miss an opportunity at the cafeteria. By lunch, though, sitting down to eat again was torture. He went to our room at the quad to lay down. Our second oldest was also feeling sick that day and needed to be picked up for having a fever. (Something our kids just traded around almost the entire time we lived in there.) He went and picked up Isabel and they both took a nap. A couple hours later I dropped off our other two children with him while I took a required computer class. I saw the strained look on his face when I brought the kids in, but he and I both knew I needed to take the class on computer encryption and that I had no option. I came back as quickly as I could and found him sitting on the toilet, and the kids up from their nap. I asked him what color his poop was and he said, “Green?” “Like yesterday?” I asked. “I guess?” came his short reply. “I’m sorry, just let me see it,” I demanded. “You think that’s green?” I asked, pointing at it to make him to look, “Is that the same color it was yesterday?” “Yes, I think so?” came his sheepish response. “Jay. That’s black. You are bleeding somewhere inside.” He just looked at me, expressionless. I told him I would be back in a minute and told him I was going to go find someone to ask them about him going to a doctor. What I was really doing was finding someone to take our kids so I could MAKE him go to the hospital. I was gone for a few minutes and came back to the room to hear a horrible retching sound. “Jay?!” I called, “What is THAT?!” referring to the sound. I ran to the bathroom and found him naked and on all fours in the bathtub, vomiting black chunks and liquid. It was filling the bottom of the bathtub. I ran out and asked some friends to make sure he didn’t pass out and aspirate while I found some medical help and get that friend I found to watch the kids. By the time I turned and ran back toward the quad, Jay’s babysitters were running out and telling me that they were calling 911. My heart dropped, thinking he had started vomiting fresh blood, but was later relieved to find nothing much had changed. He was still actively vomiting black, digested blood. Apparently that was what had been making his stomach feel so full and giving him reflux. Finally one of the nurses and medics showed up to evaluate the situation, and a few minutes later the paramedics showed up. Jay had stopped vomiting and I was busy cleaning him off and unclogging the drain. He hands, knees, face, and stomach were covered in what looked like water logged, black, soot and coffee grounds.

Jay’s face was gray. There was no line of distinction separating the hue of his lips from the rest of his face. By the time the paramedics had come, our small quad bathroom was full of people and Jay had kindly been given a washcloth to keep him decent. (That was a joke for a long time.) Since he had stopped vomiting, he was back to acting light hearted, albeit nude and colorless. He and I were loaded up into the ambulance and away we went. I had an amazing opportunity to share the Gospel with the ambulance driver after hearing how the Lord was wooing him. Later, I found out Jay was doing the same from the stretcher in the back as he witnessed to the other paramedic. I happily thought, “That’s exactly why we are going through this mess. Those guys needed to hear about Jesus’ love for them. (Now Jay will be fine andwe’llgettogohome.Amen.)” The trailing off of my conversation with myself is intentional. I didn’t know what still lay ahead.

Having gotten all that pressure off of his stomach, Jay felt amazingly better. He was scheduled for an endoscopy in the morning, I would go home to sleep, and return in the morning for his procedure. As I stood there and reviewed the plan with our coordinator, Jay called my name. I turned to look at him and saw sweat dripping from his beard and hair. “He’s going to vomit,” I said to myself as I swiftly grabbed the large gray trashcan from the wall. And he did. He vomited bright, red, fresh blood. Even as I type this, my eyes well with tears. “NO,” was the only thought or word I could muster and I left him there, holding his own cumbersome trashcan, as he emptied his life into it, one heave at a time.

Our coordinator had left the room to call for help and conveniently caught me as I ran out. She started to pray for me, boldly and bravely, when suddenly I realized that I had left Jay alone to hold his own trashcan and I panicked at the thought of him fainting. What I felt momentarily was guilt. What overcame me next was despair. There was no room for self examination. No time to think about how I looked to those coming and going from the room. In my mind, it was just God and me, and I was telling Him exactly what I thought. Out-loud and LOUD. “You can’t make me watch him die. You can’t! Please God, NO, you can’t make me watch him die!”

You will never hear me say that I can hear the voice of God. In some ways “voice” seems too normal, too small. No, what I heard was Him; the Holy Spirit, in all His simplicity and clarity, “What would you like Me to do?” Desperately I shouted my reply, “OH! Save him! Please save him!”

What happened next, I have only inadequate words to describe. The presence of God came and stood on my right side. His warmth seemed to touch me as He leaned in and whispered, “Am I enough for you, Lori? Or do you need him?” “Him” was my husband. “Him” was my most prized possession. “Him” was who I had put in the way of me leaning on and trusting my Savior. Peace flooded my heart, soul, and mind as I watched my husband continue to die. I had flipped from absolute, blinding desperation to holy sight! I reached for a paper towel, wiped blood and spit from my husband’s beard and calmly said, “This is a really bad color on you. Let’s do something else tonight.” Now knowing the presence of my Comforter, I comforted my husband.

Know this: The Lord didn’t promise to heal my husband. No, that peace came from the presence of God ALONE. He ALONE can do that to Not just for us, but TO us. Trying to put my husband second to God wasn’t something I could accomplish after years of trying, yet God accomplished it in an instant. Suddenly I knew, and will know forever, that no matter what happens in my life, the presence of God is enough. HE IS ENOUGH. By the grace and mercy of God, may no one ever come before Him ever again.

Jay got worse after that moment with the Lord. An emergency endoscopy was performed. The artery with a PIN-HOLE ulcer that had poked through his stomach lining was shot with epinephrine and clamped. He got worse. His blood tests showed he was still bleeding, somewhere, somehow. Crazy things happened and kept happening, but two days later, Jay got suddenly better and we suddenly went home to the training facility, our heads still spinning with what had happened. Jay didn’t remember most of it and even admitted forgetting it had even happened about a year later. I never forgot.

It ruined me. Not ruined me like a stain on a white cloth. Ruined like a wild horse when broken. It ruined me for my benefit so that I could be driven and directed by the Lord. It ruined me so that I wouldn’t single handedly ruin my marriage 5 months later, when I found myself in an unwanted pregnancy. It ruined me so that the Lord could take MY will and crush it, replacing it with HIS will so that I would be completely dependent on HIM and not my husband when we found out that unborn baby was very sick. When that pregnancy took us from the city we loved in North India to the lesser loved Delhi, I was so broken and humbled by the process that my husband was able to be furious, selfish, disappointed, and in turn broken, too. The Lord got me out of the way so He could do a good and holy work on my husband. My God loves him, too. I watched, prayed, and waited as this same God that loves us took everything from us. I hid in Him on our flight back to the US that would save our unborn child’s life. I finally knew what it was the Bible meant when it tells us to rest in Him. I became enveloped in His love for the next year and a half as He fought for our son’s life. I was guarded in Him as the Lord did a mighty work on my heartbroken husband.

I never knew all that the Lord would do through a stomach hemorrhage. The blessing that He placed on us as a family, that we would survive what lay ahead… how could I not trust Him for everything now? Lord, make me faithful. Keep me humble. I am a beast that has been broken, for my good and Your glory. Praise God.

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.