I Can't Stand Tall Enough....

Those were days with no concrete thoughts – but many impressions.  If my husband was missing, I was fretful.  If nurses attempted to turn my body or change IV lines or pound my lungs to prevent pneumonia, I was resentful.  If music was playing, I would become settled.

As consciousness gradually wound its way around the impressions, any knowledge was flimsy, fleeting.  Time and people and surroundings were like slides on a projector screen that didn’t remain long enough for me to identify the faces or places.  Meanwhile pain was constant and confusing – I was weeks away from a context for all of this fragmentation.

I had desires:  I wanted my shoes, so I could leave.  I wanted to be helped to an upright position, so I could go use the bathroom.  I wanted my kids, desperately.  These were frustrating urges because my ability to communicate seemed so limited.  Somehow, the obstacle was making people understand – not my brokenness.

Oddly, through the haze of pain and drugs and trauma, frustration, fretting and desperation, there was no fear.  Underneath, around and through everything was the solid confidence that I am loved. 

I am loved. 

I am loved. 

…with a love beyond my humanity and mortality – a love of my soul, my essence, my me-ness.  I am loved by the One who carefully made me, and called me by name, and walks through the fire and the water with me, and promises to be with me always, even to the end of the age.

Everything shifted perspective for me in the ICU in Bethlehem.  I had been so focused on so many wrong things about holiness and obedience in my attempt to know God, that I missed the most pervasive scriptural truth.  God loves me.  That gloriously shining knowledge eclipses all the rule keeping that leaves me entangled in my sin and my self. 

Within the cacophony of life weighted by performance and unachievable standards of holiness, I was silenced with the completeness of my redemption. 

And as physical healing came, that undergirding certainty blessedly did not leave.  It colors the way I process everything.  But what harm have I done with my deformed perspective through 25 years of parenting?  That question gnaws at me.  I should have been a different wife, mother, sister, friend.  “Beloved, let us love one another, for love is of God and everyone that loves is born of God and knows God.  The one who does not love does not know God, for God is love.”  I memorized those words and taught them to my children; but I didn’t understand them and I didn’t live them.  I didn’t love my family – not in the gracious way I am loved.  My love and acceptance was always conditional and formulaic.  What warped view did I teach them of God?

Standing here, looking back, I am tempted to fear the effect of my blindness on those I should have loved better.  But I am aware again of the Everlasting Arms that have been enveloping me and I relinquish my presumption and pride.  Because I am short; I can’t stand tall enough to block God.