3 ~ (June 17, 1983)
The Burning Bush
I tried to concentrate on the lovely orchestral symphony, wanting to honor the people who had thought this would be a nice break from the hospital, but couldn’t stop the tears flowing down my cheeks. At intermission we gave up, and David took me from the concert to a nearby park. He tried to comfort me, but his words only frustrated and angered me. Rather, his words set off the anger that was stuffed down inside of me. I asked him for some time alone, and wandered off into the park, hardly noticing the beauty of the warm June evening.
“If you’re a God of love,” I railed through my tears, “why did Karis’s little roommate have to die? How can you allow little children to suffer? Not just Karis, but every one of the children in that hospital? And if you don’t care enough, or aren’t powerful enough, to heal them, why should I follow you? Why should I trust you?”
Exhausted, I threw myself down on the grass. The vision of my six-week-old daughter, hooked up to IVs and monitors, with a tube coming out of her little nose, a catheter protruding from her chest and a newly-constructed ileostomy keeping company with the long surgical incision down her abdomen, kept intruding every time I tried to stop crying. But finally, I grew still, and in that moment I heard a voice speaking to me. It was so vivid and real that I sat up and looked around to see who was there. “I will never leave you nor forsake you,” said the Voice. “But if you turn away from me, you will not know my presence with you.”
That was all, but I knew He was still there, waiting for my decision. He hadn’t responded to my angry challenge, nor answered my questions. For many long minutes, I sat there on the grass, struggling with overwhelming emotions, wanting above all that my little daughter be healed. But I had no bargaining power. I had only to make a simple choice: to trust, or to turn away. To trust without understanding, without any promises except for his Presence. Or to indulge my anger and resentment and allow bitterness to begin digging into my heart. If I turned away from God, my daughter would still die, and I would be left both without her and without the God I had known and tried to follow all of my life.
Still he waited for me to choose. “Lord,” I finally said, “I want to trust you and follow you, but this hurts so badly I know I will need a lot of help. I’m not going to be very good at this. Please, please help me.”
As I lay back in the grass, a series of images flashed through my mind, each one showing me that God was with us. He knew—he cared—he was involved. He had not abandoned us. I saw the loveliness of my newborn daughter, born round and chubby so she had something to draw from in the days without nutrition that followed her birth. I remembered the ease of her delivery (with Danny, I had been in labor for 45 hours and was utterly exhausted by the time he was born). My mother, arriving in the US from her home in Guatemala, exactly when we needed her to care for Karis and Danny while I was in the hospital with a post-partum infection. My father, taking one look at Karis and ordering us off to the doctor. I chuckled again at the memory of Dr. W, with yellow milk running down his face after Karis bilious-vomited all over him, and thanked God for his kindness to us in those first shocking days of coming to terms with the fact that Karis had a serious problem. It was a little harder to be grateful for Dr. R, so cocky in knowing that he was a world-renowned pediatric surgeon, the guy who wrote the textbooks. Yet God had used him to keep Karis alive and to figure out what was wrong in her little body. The fact that we—or rather, Karis’s puzzling symptoms—had played a small role in humbling of Dr. R’s arrogance, suddenly humbled me. I remembered the other babies who had died as infants, because they had been born before TPN.
All of that gave me courage to think in God’s Presence about our present dilemma: Dr. R’s conviction that we should stop the parenteral nutrition and let Karis die. Was it just coincidence that our church had planned a prayer meeting for Karis at the hospital the next day, the very weekend that we were supposed to be thinking about ending her life? My conviction grew, that we should support her in living as long as possible—that it wasn’t our job to decide whether anyone should live or die. That in this, as in everything, we needed to trust the God who was there. I let my mind play over Karis’s own spunkiness and determination to live, which experienced nurses commented on from the very beginning. Her charm, and her trust in us. The delight of her smiles and joy, as small as she was, and the tight hold she already had on our hearts. I started thinking about taking her HOME; finally, having all of our family together.
Gradually, I began to feel a sense of peace, and was able to allow God’s Presence to be enough. Enough for tonight. Enough to go home with my husband, to let myself sleep. Enough to leave questions and contradictions and tomorrow’s worries for tomorrow. Enough.
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