12 ~ (August 1999) Time Out for
A Christmas Story
Although this happened in August, I always think of it as a Christmas story, because it taught me so much about Incarnation.
Following our son’s graduation from PACA in June of ‘99, our family was in the US for yet another short furlough. Dan spent the summer with his aunt and uncle in New Jersey, working and preparing to start college. As the rest of us traveled and visited friends, family, and supporting churches, Karis had more and more trouble keeping up with the program.
In late June, Dave and I took 16-year-old Karis to Pittsburgh for the first time, for motility studies recommended by both Dr. F in Indianapolis and Dr. G in São Paulo. The studies showed a high level of dysfunction, which was not a surprise. Various medications to stimulate peristalsis (the squeezing action of the intestines) were tried while Karis was hooked up to the monitors. One of them seemed to help a little, so Karis began to give herself daily shots. We weren’t convinced that it made much difference. The doctors in Pittsburgh also recommended that she have a G-J tube inserted, which could be useful for venting her stomach and small intestine when she became distended. Karis categorically refused to have one more surgery and one more piece of hardware protruding from her abdomen.
So, our hopes for finding help from the intestinal care experts in Pittsburgh met with sparse results, but at least we started getting to know the doctors there and would have another source of reference when Karis needed it.
On August 1st Rachel, 14, flew back to Brazil to stay with friends, so that she would not be late for the beginning of the PACA school year on the 4th. Karis, Valerie, and I stayed in Wheaton while Dave attended a conference at Willow Creek. During a tour of Wheaton College, Karis nearly passed out. By the time David got back to Wheaton, late in the evening of August 4th, I was convinced that we had to find help for her. The next day we were scheduled to drive from Wheaton to Mansfield, OH, where Dave was to be a speaker at a missions conference. Our friend Dr. B, a family practice physician, was practically on the way in South Bend, two and a half hours east of Wheaton. We called and woke him up, and he agreed to see Karis if we could arrive by 6:30 a.m., since he had a full schedule. Poor man, had he known how many times in the ensuing years we would be waking him up, he might not have taken on the Karis challenge. (We discovered that 4:30 a.m. is a terrific time to drive around Chicago!)
After examining Karis, Dr. B told us that we could either hospitalize her there, or drive south to Riley Children’s Hospital in Indianapolis, where she could be cared for by Dr. F, who had been following her long-distance for the past several months. Dr. B recommended that we take her to Riley. We drove to Indy, and David left Karis and me with our suitcases in the hospital lobby, hoping to still make Mansfield in time for the opening of the missions conference. We knew no one in Indianapolis.
Dr. F inserted a central line and put Karis on TPN. As days passed and she grew stronger, Karis started visiting other young patients in the hospital: a little girl severely burned in a house fire . . . a boy with spinal meningitis having his umpteenth surgery . . . a toddler who had open heart surgery and whose parents were unable to be with her . . .
I, meanwhile, stayed in Karis’s hospital room and sulked. Or I went outdoors and walked around and around the hospital complex, crying and begging God to heal my daughter, for her sake and for our whole family’s sake. I was not a happy camper. Eleven-year-old Valerie called from Ohio and told me she was bored being just with her dad and his meetings and wanted to go back to Brazil and back to school at PACA. So on August 8th she flew by herself from Ohio to Newark and then to São Paulo, where kind friends met her and took her in. At that point our family of six was in five different places. David continued with the traveling and meeting schedule already set up. He called me on the 16th but didn’t remember that it was my birthday.
Did I mention that I was not a happy camper?
On the morning of the 17th, while I was hiding out in Karis’s hospital room as she made the rounds of her friends, a lady appeared in the doorway and asked if I would go downstairs and have coffee with her. As we sat in the hospital coffee shop, she told me the following story.
When her fourteen-year-old daughter Annette (not her real name) understood that she was dying, she had pulled completely into herself, assumed a fetal position, and refused to talk to anyone. Not her mother or her grandmother. Not any of the nurses or doctors or therapists. Not the psychologist nor the chaplain. Not any of her friends who called on the phone from their hometown two hours away. No one was able to touch Annette through the wall of silence she built around herself.
Distressed and desperate, Annette’s mom had found herself praying, for the first time since childhood. She prayed for God to send someone who could reach Annette.
The next day, Annette’s mom told me, an angel appeared in the doorway of her daughter’s hospital room. An angel dressed in the same frumpy hospital gown, pushing an identical IV pole with the same TPN and lipid bottles hanging from it as Annette had. Asking if she could come in, this angel went over to Annette and just sat by her bed, stroking her hair and singing to her.
Then the angel went away, but the next day she was back, talking gently to Annette, singing to her, praying for her. Later that afternoon, on another visit, Annette opened her eyes and looked at the angel and saw her smile. As the days passed, Annette began to smile back.
Annette’s mom told me that because God had answered her first prayer, she had started praying more, as had her mother, Annette’s grandma. As we finished our coffee, she invited me to come by Annette’s room. There I saw Karis sitting in bed with Annette, blonde and auburn heads bent together over a Bible, from which Annette was reading aloud. On each side of the bed, identical IV poles with their identical bottles of TPN and lipids stood sentry. Annette’s grandmother sat by the bed listening with tears running down her cheeks.
I had to ask to be excused because of tears in my own eyes. I ran outside and once more paced around the hospital complex, this time crying out in repentance for my self-centeredness and impatience. If God chose to answer a desperate mother’s plea by sending Karis to Indianapolis, how could I continue to nurture resentment? “Please don’t let me ever forget this, Lord,” I prayed. “And please help me to remember that I have asked you to be Lord of my life, and that means I have freely offered you the right to do with me and my family as you choose. I thank you with all of my heart that you accomplished your purposes with Annette despite my lousy attitude, because Karis was willing to let your grace shine through her weakness.”
“. . . Jesus had to be made like his brothers in every way . . .” (Hebrews 2:17)
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