The Healing Tears

Come and see what the Lord has done…

            -Psalm 46

If you attend a church for long enough, you absorb a lot of jargon.  It is usually vague and unhelpful.

     Everything happens for a reason.

     Where God closes a door, He opens a window.

     The Lord works in mysterious ways.

     Various other clichéd motivations poster slogans that I can’t think of right now…

The odd thing is that I do believe that those things are true.  God really does work that way, but we throw those phrases out far too frequently to the hurting, like oddly shaped Band-Aids.

My family has been pulled through the emotional fire lately, and the more I hear those phrases said to me, the more I am starting to recognize what is really going on.  When someone comes up to me with another cliché they saw in some bookstore (the ones that rhyme are my favorites), it takes everything in me not to call out the truth behind the “insights.”

       …They are just being lazy.

They care, but not enough to sit with me.  I can say this because I do it a lot.

I have told people that I will pray for them, and then I forgot to.

I have cared just enough for a student to stop the crying.

I have tried to fix “it”, not realizing that I was actually stopping the process for growth in them.

The great Dan Allendar said once that, “each of our stories mark us.  In each story, we are given a taste of what it means to know Christ’s death and…His resurrection.”

I think I get so uncomfortable with pain that I try to do anything I can to help myself and others actually not feel God’s death.  The problem is that I am actually slowing down the process by which God not only grows us, but also gives us a taste of the resurrection.

Let me show you a little what I mean…

Many of you have walked through some horrific scenes in life.  I really have not.  I have both parents and a little family and my dear grandpa died a few years ago, but other that, I have not tasted death as much as some have.  I will not pretend to say that my stories are better than others.  They are not by any means.  But they are stories.  They have marked me and I have seen in recent months what my soul has longed for.

The Glory of God.

Now some journeys seem to start by taking a leap of faith.  For others, they feel as though you were walking through a sunny meadow for a moment and then were sideswiped by a semi truck.  I am not sure if my recent wanderings started on a sunny day, but I still have the scars from the truck. 

5 months ago, my family began a journey.  We knew God was calling us to an adventure, a sort of new role in the life of our church.  I took on more of the youth department leadership, which allowed my good friend Matt to step into where He thought God was leading his family, to be the head of worship in our church.

There were very humbling roles for everyone involved.

I felt very honored to be succeeding Matt.  I also had no idea what I was doing-which is exciting for a while!  Feeling like you are constantly falling on your face keeps you in a remarkably constant prayerful position.  I would love to say my prayers were elaborate.  They were not.  I am not sure at times if even I knew what my mashup of words was getting at.  And that was on a good day!  Usually they consisted much more of the Dave Chappelle variety – Jesus, help!

Then, as so often happens after God makes a move, crisis entered our family.  We were side swiped by the emotional semi truck of my son’s Autism diagnosis.

I know I have said this before, but stuff like that feels honestly like you are drowning but can never quite die.  Sheri and I faced the grief, raw anger, confusion, denial and hope as best we could, but even bright days seemed cloudy.

As the tests progressed and all hope of it being a simple mistake on the part of the evaluators vanished like a morning mist, we were left to grapple with a reality we never, ever saw coming.

Christmas came and went and the conversations between Sheri and I seemed to just be stuck on replay.  We continued to just try and hang on.  Many people deal with stress constructively; I dared my body to not break down from copious amounts of junk food and long, angry runs.  It felt a little like pouring sludge in an engine and slamming the gas pedal.  I also became much more adept at the art of sledgehammering objects.

You tricked me God.  I followed you out here, where are You?

Just follow me a little farther…

 

In the span of what felt like a year, but was probably more like a week, the answers to all the tests and the worries we had came flooding in.  Our 4-month wait was over.

It is a strange thing to wait for so long and then have it all come together.  But sometimes God likes to run up the score just so later you do not have any doubts…

By chance, Sheri had a meeting with her boss and her supervisor in which they said they were willing to work with us to move Sheri to part time when we needed to – a monumental relief.

Then a few days later, the reports all came back from all the evaluations of Jack.  He qualified for all the intervention therapy he could handle.  He would start that next week!

About that same time, I was able to hire an awesome guy part time to help me during the next few months with my responsibilities at work.

Over the span of that week, several texts came at impossible exact times that made me pull over in my car, an ugly mess.

I also had three separate chance encounters with three different students about how (with none of them talking to the others) they wanted to follow in my footsteps someday.  It came like successive gifts straight from God’s heart to prove to me that He really was placing me here, now.

Encouragement seemed to flood our drought cracked hearts that week.  It was completely overwhelming, entirely undeserved and we needed it so very badly.  It felt like Sheri and I were downing glass after glass of water after a long, bitter trudge in a lonely desert.

You remembered us,
Even when we lost sight of you.
We looked at the wave,
We saw the clouds gather,

But still You remained.
We held up our candles of faith,
“Don’t snuff them out!”
“Don’t let them burn all the way down!”
And you did not!

You came into darkness and did not remove it,
But came close enough that by the little light,

We could see your face
That there, even there, You remain.

The therapy started that next week.  We were so nervous, but as it progressed, it gave way to this…

Jack before a session.

Jack with one of his amazing therapists.

Hads enjoying a new thing –painting with Momma during Jack’s therapy sessions.

Jack this afternoon after a rough session for him.

There will be many hard days ahead.  Today for example, he was having a particularly hard time learning a new skill.  Sheri and I sat in the kitchen, listening to him cry for a half hour before he finally gave in and performed the necessary task.  We gave each other more than a few sad looks.  It is a tough journey sometimes, but we do not weep as those that have no hope.

Sometimes, the only way for God to prove back to me that He is real is to let me watch His redemption.

Not to some bible character.

Not to a member of our congregation.

Not to my friend.

To me.

I had sworn that nothing good would come out of this.  Yet here we are.

Sometimes God knows that He just has to let it hurt.  That He has to…

…Make me walk the road.

To have my family feel like we are coming apart.

To let me be pierced straight through and through with sorrow.

But not be crushed to the end.

To be pressed out in ways we never wished.

To be thrown down the hard steps.

…Yet be brought back to life.

So let’s drop the posters.  I don’t think they work the way the Christian marketing companies want us to believe.  Let’s pay attention to each other or else you might well miss the brightness. We carry this precious Message around in the unadorned clay pots of our ordinary lives. That’s to prevent anyone from confusing God’s incomparable power with us. As it is, there’s not much chance of that. You know for yourselves that we’re not much to look at. We’ve been surrounded and battered by troubles, but we’re not demoralized; we’re not sure what to do, but we know that God knows what to do; we’ve been spiritually terrorized, but God hasn’t left our side; we’ve been thrown down, but we haven’t broken.   -2 Corinthians 4:8-12

 

8 Come and see what the Lord has done,

The desolations he has brought on the earth.

9 He makes wars cease

To the ends of the earth.

He breaks the bow and shatters the spear;

He burns the shields with fire.

10 He says, “Be still, and know that I am God;

I will be exalted among the nations,

I will be exalted in the earth.”

11 The Lord Almighty is with us;

The God of Jacob is our fortress.

-Psalm 46