i am changed

{via}


On my way to work last Friday night, I got a call from the charge nurse letting me know that one of my sweet patients had taken a turn for the worse and had only a couple of days left to live, at best. The charge nurse asked if I would be okay taking care of her that night. I swallowed a rush of fear and hesitantly agreed. I'd walked through too much with this little girl and her family to shy away in fear. I knew this day was coming - when a patient close to my heart would pass away - but I wasn't sure I was ready for it to happen on my watch. As I cared for her that night and watched her gulp for air time and time again, I physically felt my heart break. The feisty spirit I'd seen in her for months was still very present as she fought to hang onto her life. I sat with her family - Mom, Dad, Big sis, Mimi, Paw-paw, Grandma and Pops - and cried with them over the loss that was sure to come. I sat at her bedside, held her hand, and prayed for God to hold her close.

The twelve hours of my shift came and went, and somehow she was still hanging on. I went home and tried my best to get some sleep, but my mind continually played through various scenes from the five months I had cared for her.
...I thought about Christmas, how excited she was to see Santa Claus and how she tore through that mountain of gifts... 

...I thought about the treasure hunt I set up for her and how we went around the unit searching for "gold" and "diamonds."... 
...I thought about the day we shaved her head and the big smile that came to her face when Pops told her she looked beautiful...

...I thought about her favorite Curious George pillow and how frantically we had to search for it one day during a major meltdown...

...I thought about the day she was finally able to eat again and scarfed down at least 12 cheese sticks...

...I thought about the night that she quit breathing, and how her momma sobbed into my chest after we had resuscitated her...

...I thought about the volcano we built with her dad and how she erupted into laughter as the explosion hit the ceiling (whoops!)...

...I thought about Valentine's Day, when she woke up at 4 a.m. and would not go back to sleep until her cards had been delivered to each box...

...I thought about how she and Paw-paw would banter back and forth: "I love you more"... "NO, I love you more."...

...I thought about how her eyes glittered and could almost hear her sweet little laugh."

As I laid there sleeplessly, I could not help but think about how that 6-year old little girl had stolen my heart, and how I absolutely cherished each person in her family. As memories continued to reel through my mind, I felt a rising anger begin to boil beneath my chest. I tossed and turned, all tangled in the sheets, and my heart was doing much the same within. God and I wrestled back and forth for hours...
"God, why this little girl?"

 "Why this family?" 

"I don't understand why she had to suffer so much..."

"This isn't fair... Don't you care? How can you just let this happen?"

"I am struggling to believe that you are still good in the midst of all of this."

When I woke the next day, my head was pounding and my eyes were still puffy and tear-stained. I went back to work on Saturday night and the family told me they were waiting on one more person to arrive to pull her life support. I marveled at the bravery of their decision and held hands with them, with her, for another night as she continued to gasp and fight. Another shift came and went, and she was still holding on. On Sunday afternoon, after many restless hours and shallow sleep, I woke to my phone ringing. It was work, calling to tell me that she had died. It wasn't a surprise, but I still felt like the wind had been knocked out of me. Immediately I felt tears flood my eyes and I broke down. I went into my bathroom, filled the tub with hot water, and sat there for who knows how long weeping over her loss and the knowledge that her family was surely in deep mourning. The water just couldn't get hot enough nor could I sink low enough to drown out the sorrow. As I climbed back into bed, the tympani of my own heart beat was deafening. I laid there thinking, "Why is my heart still beating? Why not hers?" And God and I did some more wrestling.

On Monday I woke up and told myself that I no longer had permission to sit and wallow. It was time to start trusting and processing and reconciling. I went to my favorite coffee shop and journaled and prayed and read and realigned my heart with the promises of scripture. It took an active choice to cling to Christ when everything in me wanted to run and cling to bitterness and distrust. As I was sitting there reading, I got a call from a precious woman back in Utah (the one and only Tamara Anderson) who had heard from my momma about my rough week... She called to encourage me and love on me. We talked for a few brief minutes, but I'm convinced that her words were a gift from the Lord. She said to me,

"Jarah, God is big enough for your questions... 

But you've got to remember that life is not always about the answers."

As I hung up the phone, I quickly jotted down the words she had spoken. I knew that I needed to remember them, to chew on them and revisit them in the days to come. I then picked up my book (Where is God When It Hurts? by Philip Yancey... a must read), and read the following:

"God did not exempt even himself from human suffering. He too hung on a gallows, at Calvary, and that alone is what keeps me believing in a God of love. God does not, in the comfortable surroundings of heaven, turn a deaf ear to the sounds of suffering on this groaning planet. He joined us, choosing to live among an oppressed people... in circumstances of poverty and great affliction. He too was an innocent victim of cruel, senseless torture. At that moment of black despair, the Son of God cried out... 'God, why have you forsaken me?'
Jesus, the Son of God on earth, embodied all that I have been trying to say about pain. Like Job, an innocent sufferer who preceded him, he did not receive an answer to the questions of cause: 'Why?... why?' he called out from the cross, and heard nothing but the silence of God. Even so, he responded with faithfulness, turning his attention to the good that his suffering could produce: 'for the joy set before him [Christ] endured the cross' (Hebrews 12:2). What joy? The transformation, or redemption, of humanity.
The Gospel writers stress that Jesus' suffering was not a matter of impotence; he could have called a legion of angels. Somehow he had to go through it for fallen creation to be redeemed. God took the Great Pain of his own Son's death and used it to absorb into himself all the minor pains of earth. Suffering was the cost to God of forgiveness.
Human suffering remains meaningless and barren unless we have some assurance that God is sympathetic to our pain, and can somehow heal that pain. In Jesus we have that assurance.
Thus the Christian message encompasses the full range of anger and despair and darkness... It offers a complete identification with the suffering world. But Christianity takes a further step as well. It is called the Resurrection, the moment of victory when the last enemy, death itself, is defeated. A seeming tragedy, Jesus' crucifixion, made possible the ultimate healing of the world.
Did God desire the Holocaust? Ask the question another way: Did God desire the death of his own Son? Obviously, because of his character he could not possibly desire such atrocities. And yet both happened, and the question then moves from the unanswerable, 'Why?' to another question, 'To what end?'
At the instant of pain, it may seem impossible to imagine that good can come from tragedy (It must have seemed so to Christ at Gethsemane). We never know in advance exactly how suffering can be transformed into a cause for celebration. But that is what we are asked to believe. Faith means believing in advance what will only make sense in reverse." (emphasis mine)

I went back and reread the words again... they resonated almost eerily with those spoken by my wise mentor. The second time through the point started to take root and I realized that God wasn't going to give me answers, but he was going to give me himself. He was speaking to me in very tangible ways and as I processed it all, I began to cry... and not the pretty kind. There I was sitting in the corner of that coffee shop, full on ugly crying. I'm talking chest sobs, people. My heart was arrested with the beauty of a God who is sympathetic to our pain... a Savior who willingly came and endured ultimate suffering to bring us wholeness and life eternal.

After another tearful hour, I pulled myself together long enough to rush past a sea of awkward glances from fellow coffee shop dwellers. I made my way back to my car and it hit me that I had been changed over the course of that afternoon. God was doing work in this heart. But I suppose the process started about 5 months ago when I met a spunky little 6-year old who grabbed my heart and would not let go.

That night as I laid in my bed, my mind was reeling once again, but in a different sort of way. I thought about the words Jesus spoke from the Sermon on the Mount,  "Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted." "Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God." "Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven."  And, you know what? I think I'm starting understand a little more of what Jesus meant as I've held hands with the sick and dying, and walked alongside those who suffer and mourn. They are blessed, because their lowly position befits the coming of His Kingdom. It comes in big ways and in small, and almost always in paradoxical forms that take us by surprise and open the floodgates for God's grace to rush in. God is teaching me to see His Kingdom, even now in all of the brokenness of this world.

I can see it in a little girl whose favorite color was purple,

who fumbled with a tiny cross bracelet as she bravely faced death.

I can see it in family blood thickened in the face of fear and uncertainty.

I can see it in a pink satin cape that transformed a little girl into a superhero.

I see it in laughter over a ridiculous 'code brown' (post 12 cheese sticks, of course).

I see it in sharing a Christmas meal, crammed around a bed in a tiny hospital room... shrimp dip never tasted so good.

I see His kingdom in blowing bubbles, reading bedtime stories, and putting on sock pupet shows.

I see it in death, in Christ restoring wholeness to a child who was physically broken her entire earthly life.

I saw His kingdom while sitting at her funeral, as the sorrow of death and suffering was transformed into a cause for celebration. I witnessed hope rising and love overcoming. 

And, dear friends, I saw his kingdom as I held on to the necks of that family and cried and heard them proclaim their hope in the resurrection.

All of these good and perfect moments were a taste, just a small taste of what God truly intended. "On Earth as it is in Heaven." Let that be my cry!

This week has been quite the journey, dear readers. I can honestly say that I am a different person walking out of it than I was walking in... Not because I found an answer to the cause for this suffering, but because I encountered a God whose heart bleeds with those who mourn.

This God who was, and is, and is to come,

Well, I can say now that I know, in that part of my heart where knowing lives, that He is good.

Yes, even in pain

and in suffering. 

Even in great loss

and in death.

"Oh, death where is your victory? Oh, death where is your sting?"

Come Lord Jesus.