Category Archives: Suffering

What’s new?

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Half way through last Sunday’s sermon, a skirmish in one of the pews got everyone’s attention and stopped the pastor’s preaching.

“Someone call 911!” a man said, as he bent over the person having trouble. Several from the congregation jumped to help, and a uniformed security man entered the sanctuary speaking into his shoulder radio, “Yes, the Free Church on Douglas.”

I was sitting with my former next-door-neighbor, who’d had personal experience with 911 and had lost her husband to quick cancer shortly after we lost Nate. We both clutched.

The elderly gentleman struggling during the service was given a wheelchair ride to the parking lot where an emergency vehicle awaited, its flashing lights pushing their way through our stained glass windows. The service resumed, but Becky and I were lost in thought.

How quickly our minds race back to trauma. A soldier, newly home from a war, flinches when he hears what sounds like gunfire. An earthquake victim feels like running when a truck passes and the ground vibrates.

Trauma imprints our brains with extra oomph when it’s been life-threatening. A 911 call, death, gunfire, an earthquake – each stimulates us to act on fearful impulse. Later, when similar circumstances pop up, we react the same.

Some people organize their entire lives around an upsetting event, either by reliving it over and over or by making sure it doesn’t ever happen again. In both cases the incident dominates thought life and keeps someone stuck. Opportunities are lost, and a sad spirit dominates every day.

Is there a way to distance ourselves from past trauma when something like a 911 call yanks us back?

Yes, and God gives us the key: to set our minds on him.

If we fill our heads with his supremacy and sufficiency, other thoughts must leave. It’s easy to get mentally lost in our troubles, and immediately after Nate died, I felt that way, continually reliving his rapid decline and death, camping there for months. But calling out to God for comfort and peace slowly filled my mind with something other than Nate, and it was the Lord.

If today I was asked to hold someone’s hand as they died, even a stranger, deep sadness would cover me like a heavy blanket. But I wouldn’t stay under it for long, because I’ve become acquainted with a new mindset God has put in my head, thoughts dotted with hope and future plans because he is in them. Although I’ll never forget the details of our family trauma, I don’t live inside of it anymore.

God is our Creator, and he’s continually making all things new. When we believe that and watch for how he’s doing it in us, we won’t have to fear being pulled backwards by a 911 call but can quickly move forward into the fresh optimism he’s created.

“The former things will not be remembered, nor will they come to mind. But be glad and rejoice forever in what I will create.” (Isaiah 65:17,18)

Displaced

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Birgitta and I have moved. Not permanently, just for a few days. The wood floor in our cottage is getting a new lease on its 73 year old life, and today is the first of several “poly days” when polyurethane will perfume the house. Sticky floors will dry by next week.

Having to leave home is an inconvenience for us, but it brought to mind the thousands who live in refugee camps around the world, routed out of their homes amidst traumatic circumstances.

Birgitta and I had planned ahead, making lists beforehand and packing what we wanted; refugees often leave on the run, taking only what they can carry. We left for the happy reason of home improvement; they leave to escape war or, worse yet, to preserve their lives. We’ll be home in just a few days; refugees may be displaced for months, maybe years. Some never return home.

When the biblical Abraham was told to leave home, it fell somewhere between inconvenient and awful. He wasn’t a refugee but wasn’t given a return date either. And he wasn’t given a destination. Instead he was told, “Pick up and go.” But because it was the voice of God directing him, he did it.

After that, Abraham lived as a nomadic tent-dweller, roaming desert terrain with his household and possessions, believing there was “milk and honey” at the end of the journey. He didn’t know all that we know today, that many generations would come and go before God completed his promise. In the mean time, Abraham was often sent packing.

Recent news stories have shown thousands leaving their homes to escape natural disasters and then returning to find no home at all. And of course lean financial times have displaced many others who’ve been forced out of homes they love. Dorothy of Oz fame put it well. “There’s no place like home.”

So many stories of dislocation make me wonder what God is up to.

We’ve all heard the expression, “Home is where the heart is.” Could it be that’s what God is trying to show us? Maybe home isn’t about wood floors, mud huts, mansions or igloos but about who’s inside them. If so, then losing our address might not be as traumatic as we think. As long as we hold onto those we love, anyplace can become a home.

And God is hoping to be on that list of the ones we love best. As a matter of fact, he wants to be the heart of our homes, wherever we are. When he is, he assures us we’ll always have a home, not just in the distant someday but in the now. When we get displaced, he goes along. Though we lose our houses, we don’t lose him. If we must pitch a tent, he’s inside of it with us.

And maybe it’s those times when we’ve been forced out of our brick-and-mortar homes that we suddenly feel most at home with him.

“Lord, through all the generations you have been our home!” (Psalm 90:1)

Being Prepared

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Although I’ve never been a champion at preparation, Nate was. It’s one of myriad qualities I admired about him when we first met and is a perfect illustration of opposites attracting. For 40 years his example tutored me in how to get ready for things (which is not to say I was a quick study).

Life offers unnumbered commitments for which we ought to be prepared: the first day of school, meeting an airplane, tax day, having enough gas to get to our destination. When these predictables take us by surprise, a finger can usually be pointed at the faulty party.

But sometimes we come up short on preparation because we didn’t have a clue something was coming: a premature baby, a tornado, a traffic accident, a cancer diagnosis.

And then there’s the big one, death. Even in the case of long-term illness, when death snatches a loved one, none of us are fully prepared.

Tomorrow I’ll attend the memorial service of a 32 year old young man who died suddenly, without explanation. To be prepared for that was impossible.

Although this man’s parents stood in front of a church and dedicated him to God when he was a baby, that didn’t feel like preparation for death. When they let him go off to school “on his own” each morning, that separation was nothing compared to the separation of death.

When they prayed for him, asking God’s will to be done in his life, they were opening themselves up to whatever God chose to bring. But death? They weren’t thinking of that.

It’s an encouragement to know God sees what’s coming when we don’t. Just as parents paint the nursery before the baby arrives and load the back pack before the first school day, God the Father gently moves the pieces of our lives into position before the unexpected hits us. Within the tumult, we can’t see it. But later, usually much later, we look back and say, “Oh, that was him there… and again there.”

Our family found this to be true. Several months after Nate died, my kids and I actually drew up a list of God’s “positionings” among us before the whirlwind arrived.

Getting a glimpse of this divine preparation on our behalf doesn’t lessen anyone’s sadness while going through it, but it softens the raw reality. And when we turn around to search for God, we see how he was there throughout, and can’t help but feel his love because of it.

“Father, prepare me for whatever is next.”

“Those who cleanse themselves… will be instruments for special purposes, made holy, useful to the Master and prepared to do any good work.” (2 Timothy 2:21)