Post Traumatic Ramblings...

I went to talk with a counselor about five months into this new stage of my life. I should have gone again, but somehow it was never the right week to start something long-term. Still, in that brief time, she managed to convey a few things that resonated.  The first was that I didn’t have a choice to have or not have PTS. Frankly stated, I had lived through a terrible event, so I was experiencing post-traumatic stress.

Another truth I learned is that in trauma, your first response is survival. I recall trying to tell the EMT that I couldn’t breathe because the seatbelt suspending me was too tight. His blunt words were, “If we cut the strap you will fall and crush your daughter.” I knew from his tone he was making an important point, but I couldn’t even think of what it meant other than I had to keep waiting for relief. There wasn’t room to consider myself in relationship with other people -- I only knew that I had to somehow get some breath.

To this day I grieve my first response.  That moment stands as a summary of all the midnight black days of pain, fear and grief that our daughter went through alone. I suppose understanding the normal characteristics of this abnormal disorder is supposed to help me see that I was reacting in a typical way -- but I wish I had been exceptional and heroic. I wish I had shown a love that would willingly lay down my life rather than a preoccupation with my own survival.
I wish I had been ...God, I guess.

Ultimately, my recurring struggle is that I would have done this differently.
All of it.
Our turn off that highway would have happened 90 seconds sooner, the car would not have been filled with so much weight, we would have made it across the road before we were struck...the list goes on.
If it were still to happen as it did, each of us would have emerged with a rock-solid faith that proves God’s wisdom and goodness. The truth is much messier than that.

Job confesses, “Though He slay me I will hope in Him, yet I will argue my ways to His face.”  Many times I have “argued my case” to God for not writing this story differently.

In kindness, God reveals His deity to Job, displayed in the creation and sustaining of all things.  And then all of us who are reeling from the trauma of the Fall and living in a world bent by sin hear Job’s confession:  “I know that You can do all things and that no purpose of yours can be thwarted... Therefore I have uttered what I did not understand, things too wonderful for me, which I did not know…I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees You.”

Amen.
No matter our first response, He takes us to the place where we see Him.

To whom then will you compare me, that I should be like him? says the Holy One.

Lift up your eyes on high and see: who created these?

He who brings out their host by number, calling them all by name, by the greatness of his might,

and because he is strong in power not one is missing.

Why do you say, O Jacob, and speak, O Israel,

“My way is hidden from the LORD, and my right is disregarded by my God”?

Have you not known? Have you not heard? 

The LORD is the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth. 

He does not faint or grow weary; His understanding is unsearchable.