Originally written: THIS WEEK!
I am writing to you in real time here: cold, finally got a snow in February, Valentine’s Day and Abraham Lincoln’s birthday kind of time.
I want to take a moment (a post, I suppose, in technology-speak) to catch you up to speed before hopping back in the time machine to the warmth of the summer sun.
Most days I’m doing well. I feel the Lord’s presence and experience His sustaining mercies and power over my life each day, sometimes over each hour and minute. But today the snow falls softly, like tears on the cheeks of my shattered confidence. I suppose the winter can bring that with it sometimes. The clouds that shield the light.
My latest test results: an MRI that revealed new and enhancing lesions in my brain. Lesions at work in my body. Active MS. This is not what we were hoping to hear.
Fatigue—severe fatigue—is the “silent symptom,” as the Clinic called it, that assaults me at times at a horrifying decibel… My four year old asked me the other day, “Mommy, do you want to play something where we can lay on the floor, so it’s more easier?”
I’m so tired of being tired.
It’s not normal. It’s not an “I’ve had a long day and need to put my feet up” kind of tired. It’s something all together more frustrating. Suffocating. My body is not my body anymore. The funny thing is, it never was mine to begin with. It’s just now I’m reminded of it constantly.
I will start a new medication soon, and today I am afraid. I’m afraid for the short time I have to go off the old medication, leaving me feeling defenseless against this disease. And I’m afraid of the unknown of the new medication. My insides feel anxious—about everything, not just MS. And I hate it. I mostly hate it because I know it does not honor God.
In a sermon I listened to recently, Pastor John Piper says he prays that he will preach in such a way that when calamity comes his congregation might not curse God but worship Him! Not that they won’t grieve over hardship. No. He says, he prays that they will “worship God in grief, not instead of grief!” And I have been incredibly challenged by this. I do not do this well. I’m good at praying for things, for other people, for God to help me. I’m being challenged to grow, in all this, however. As Piper suggests, perhaps I shouldn’t be praying so much just for God to bless me but that I might also worship God and bring Him glory—in my MS and in the mundane worries of everyday life.
The other day I had a few minutes to pray before heading to practice. I prayed about how to worship God in all of this. I watched the trees. I watched them sway. And it reminded me that even the wind knows His name. How awesome is our God? I thought.
And I laugh as I write this because that moment—right there—just asking, How awesome is our God?--that was worshiping in the midst of calamity, even if in the smallest of ways.
But today is heavier. Today is harder. The arrows are everywhere, and they are coming from every direction. And so I sit and watch the world silently before me—my stomach in knots—and I turn to the place I know I must go (the place I have gone so many mornings over the past year) when I want to worship and adore my God: Job 38.
So I read this aloud, as the Lord speaks to Job:
4 “Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation?
Tell me, if you understand.
5 Who marked off its dimensions? Surely you know!
Who stretched a measuring line across it?
6 On what were its footings set,
or who laid its cornerstone—
7 while the morning stars sang together
and all the angels shouted for joy?
8 “Who shut up the sea behind doors
when it burst forth from the womb,
9 when I made the clouds its garment
and wrapped it in thick darkness,
10 when I fixed limits for it
and set its doors and bars in place,
11 when I said, ‘This far you may come and no farther;
here is where your proud waves halt’?
12 “Have you ever given orders to the morning,
or shown the dawn its place,
13 that it might take the earth by the edges
and shake the wicked out of it?
14 The earth takes shape like clay under a seal;
its features stand out like those of a garment.
15 The wicked are denied their light,
and their upraised arm is broken.
16 “Have you journeyed to the springs of the sea
or walked in the recesses of the deep?
17 Have the gates of death been shown to you?
Have you seen the gates of the deepest darkness?
18 Have you comprehended the vast expanses of the earth?
Tell me, if you know all this.
19 “What is the way to the abode of light?
And where does darkness reside?
20 Can you take them to their places?
Do you know the paths to their dwellings?
21 Surely you know, for you were already born!
You have lived so many years!
22 “Have you entered the storehouses of the snow
or seen the storehouses of the hail,
23 which I reserve for times of trouble,
for days of war and battle?
24 What is the way to the place where the lightning is dispersed,
or the place where the east winds are scattered over the earth?
25 Who cuts a channel for the torrents of rain,
and a path for the thunderstorm,
26 to water a land where no one lives,
an uninhabited desert,
27 to satisfy a desolate wasteland
and make it sprout with grass?
28 Does the rain have a father?
Who fathers the drops of dew?
29 From whose womb comes the ice?
Who gives birth to the frost from the heavens
30 when the waters become hard as stone,
when the surface of the deep is frozen?
31 “Can you bind the chains of the Pleiades?
Can you loosen Orion’s belt?
32 Can you bring forth the constellations in their seasons
or lead out the Bear with its cubs?
33 Do you know the laws of the heavens?
Can you set up God’s dominion over the earth?
34 “Can you raise your voice to the clouds
and cover yourself with a flood of water?
35 Do you send the lightning bolts on their way?
Do they report to you, ‘Here we are’?
36 Who gives the ibis wisdom
or gives the rooster understanding?
37 Who has the wisdom to count the clouds?
Who can tip over the water jars of the heavens
38 when the dust becomes hard
and the clods of earth stick together?
39 “Do you hunt the prey for the lioness
and satisfy the hunger of the lions
40 when they crouch in their dens
or lie in wait in a thicket?
41 Who provides food for the raven
when its young cry out to God
and wander about for lack of food?
And I answered Him aloud. I whispered, “You do all of that, Lord.”
And although the Lord was speaking to Job, I feel Him asking me: Have you ever given orders to the morning?
No.
Have you ever shown the dawn its place?
No.
And I say it aloud: “No, I have done none of those things.”
But my God does all these things. My God is an awesome God.
I think of a lesson a friend shared from her Bible study awhile back. She said, when you read the Word of God, be challenged not to ask how that verse applies to you but rather what that verse tells you about your God. I found the change in perspective incredibly challenging albeit appropriate and eye-opening. I think it applies here. Job illuminates the power and sovereignty of our God!
He will give us each a burden to carry, and He does not ask us to suck it up, pretend it doesn’t exist, tell everyone that we’re doing great when we’re not. Let’s not be cliché, here, and act like we’ve got it all together. But that burden is not an accident, either, and the question becomes what ought we to do with it? And so I ask you, dear friend, to worship in the midst of your calamity today, whether it be large or small. Seek Him before you pick up the telephone to rely on someone else. Or before you turn to whatever your earthly comfort might be. Know that I’m trying with you… .
My experience is real. But so is my God.
I will start a new medication on February 24th. They will infuse me with a drug that--at least to me--has plenty of scary side effects. Having to switch is its own burden within this broader battle. And I want to thank you for your prayers. But I pray mostly that I will worship Him in the midst of this change.
And I am reminded once more of why I write this blog: “…so that the works of God might be displayed…”
In me.
In you.
How awesome is our God!