Bad things happen.
They do.
And when they do, we live in crisis, a hot haze of desert in all directions. You rub your eyes. It must be a dream! You blink, and somehow your still there, cut off from life.
The part that has us between panic and survival is the fear – the fear that there is no end to this hot and barren place –
With no way out of this bleary eyed place, hope is distant and the idea of stopping to smell the flowers is repugnant. {It can be like a slap in the face that shows a lack of empathy, and that’s not what I’m trying to do here.} Grief takes time, hard things take adjusting, and Ecclesiastes says it so well – “there is a time to mourn.”
8 years down the road, there is a bit of reprieve for us.
I have no map out of the desert.
We didn’t get to this rest spot by our own means, and it doesn’t mean we are gone. Truth is, we live in a wild place. Some moments the view is plush, green, and fresh, and the next time I look up we are back in the badlands.
Our reprieve comes in hubbs being home a bit more, and aside from multiple insurance denials, there is nothing huge on our plate.
But this doesn’t mean I haven’t forgotten. The years, with a babe that couldn’t sleep for more than 2 hours at a time, chasing 13 specialists, and surgeries, all while major balance issues led to non-stop screaming resulting in blood tinged vomit. And speaking of that…poor babe couldn’t help but “lose his lunch” by the minute (multiple times per hour) every. single. day. Hubbs gone for months at a time, and our marriage was still pretty brand spanking new {read growing pains and stress}. I won’t soon forget.
I have no idea where or if this blissful plateau drops off.
Health can change in an instant. From all healthy and happy to living in crisis, trapped in a hospital? – in a blink. The bottom can fall out of SO many services, meds, therapies, equipment needs, school arrangements in what feels like split seconds.
I tell you this to say, I remember. I remember the days where I couldn’t join a Bible Study w/o leaving everyone else afraid to share their prayer requests for band aids after I spewed out my blood and guts on the table. Seriously, I felt sorry for them. It wasn’t that their problems didn’t matter or were not real, it was just too much contrast.
Today? Today, for once, I had no blood and guts to spill. For the first time in a while, when asked for prayer requests, (and granted maybe I should have thought instead about THE TEST, and our future and all that lovely stuff) but instead, all I could see was manna, this perfect provision in. this. day. I just had to ask that my friends might praise God with me, for the blessings in this past week…for more in the way of Ebeneezer…and yes there was that moment where bath water was spraying up to 5 feet high over the whole room…after careful instructions not to touch a certain button…and yes, I did run in and fall flat on my rear. But overall, it was a win of a week, and I feel a need to just say, Thanks God, for respite and reprieve.
No need to store up tomorrow. In this day I had enough. In this day, my heart swelled over to sing with my kids. In this day, there were flowers in the crags, and they just couldn’t be ignored.
And to my friends in the “school of Hard Knocks” I hope you get it…that life’s not rosy, not when you have special needs, but when the flowers come, stopping to savor them {and praise the God that made them in the process} – it’s the right answer.
And if you are early in the game, if you are in that inescapable rut, know that it’s about ENDURANCE, not escape.
The flowers are there. Do you see them?
Faith is the eye-opening elixir that will bring the flowers in view, and it usually takes time to kick in.
If you can’t see them, hold firm.
Put your hope in God. Endure. Look with eyes that know that whether you can see them or not…your Father is sewing the seeds of flowers, even when all looks like the Sahara.
Let them give thanks to the Lord for his unfailing love
and his wonderful deeds for mankind,
for he satisfies the thirsty
and fills the hungry with good things.
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