Life and Breath and Everything Else

I woke up this morning to find the bed next to me vacated.  To my sleep-numbed brain, this meant nothing.  Then it meant A LOT.  I rounded the corner to discover Steve sitting at the counter, having gotten up, dressed, and gotten himself a bowl of granola completely unassisted.  A week ago, I walked with him wherever he went.  Two weeks ago he wasn't allowed to get out of bed without calling a nurse.  Three weeks ago he couldn't adjust his own position in bed.  Every day brings me a new gift from this man, and from the accelerated healing we are seeing in his body.  It seems painfully slow at times, but it sort of reminds me of how vast the world seems when you look under a microscope.  Each grain is a miracle.  Steve's nerves are slowly, slowly coming to life again as swelling recedes, as his body recovers from its trauma and has the resources to tend to those vital cells.

Grains of sand, magnified x250

(Original source not known)

You who are in the medical field have a beautiful gift from God--you have the privilege of participating in the process of healing that he created, many times far beyond what we have even yet understood.  And sometimes you are agents of assisting those into the world of broken and decaying bodies with grace and dignity.  My father is a doctor, and I have always watched amazed as he has humbly sought God's wisdom as he has cared for thousands and thousands over the years, and we have seen God use him daily.  

As we have begun to see the dozens of health care professionals examining Steve's body, there is a common theme.  They can't decide whether Steve is profoundly lucky or profoundly unlucky.  Many bikers fall, get a little banged up and walked away.  Steve landed on his head, broke his back, and sustained partial paralysis.  And yet, he broke only that bone.  There were virtually no bruises, almost no scrapes.  His memory and his brain are intact.  There were no internal injuries.  How can this be?  

I don't know how people process the world without a deep understanding of God.  Not "a higher being" or "the good guy in the sky," but God, as he has very intentionally revealed himself to be.  I don't know how you make sense of something like Steve's accident or Melody Litzau's degenerating muscles or the overwhelming, overwhelming results of a fallen world.  But the beauty--the profound beauty--of knowing God's story brings poignant, deep peace even in perhaps the scariest moment of my life.  We're not thrashing around in a world that came from chaos only to end in chaos, we're in a World that God allowed to choose or not choose him.  Our choices came with consequences, and the World, the very earth shows it.  But God is so far ahead of us that not a single moment of this pain is for nothing.  

And yet were we to count each grain of sand, one by one, to build a sand castle, would it not be painstaking and tedious and seemingly hopeless, even pointless?  

"Go to the ant, you sluggard;  consider its ways and be wise!"  (Proverbs 6:6)

An ant takes one grain at a time, hoists it, relocates it.  All its colony do the same.  Thousands and thousands of grains later, an intricate, purposeful pattern begins to take shape.  

Denise pushing Steve to work hard

So with this in mind, with great respect for the intricacy of God's plan for us, would you pray for patience for Steve with each day, and for perseverance to lift his rubbery feet off the ground one at a time?  For endurance with each exercise and each of the dozen-plus appointments?  

I've had the song from Adventure Week 2 years ago running through my head that was taken from this passage from Acts that I love, so I will leave you with this: 

"The God who made the world and everything in it, being Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in temples made by man, nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all mankind life and breath and everything.  And he made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their dwelling place, that they should seek God, and perhaps feel their way toward him and find him.  Yet he is actually not far from each one of us, for 

     'In him we live and move and have our being.'

as even some of your own poets have said, 

     'For we are indeed his offspring.'"

(Acts 17: 24-28, in Paul's address to the Athenians in their attempt to cover all their god bases.)