Seasons are a funny thing.
I get up at the same time every day… well, give and take a few
snoozes. I either pray and walk or else
pray and eat a small bite of goodness- mini pumpkin donuts lately- that I’ve
hidden from my kids! The one thing
that’s consistent in my morning routine from day to day is the coffee. Whether I am sneaking treats or walking,
there will be coffee. I guess that says
a lot about the pace of my exercise!
But it seems like just yesterday I was having a hard time
beating the sun up in the mornings. And
suddenly it’s dark until it’s time to get dressed and wrap up my morning
routine. The changing seasons seem to
sneak in when I am not looking.
There is a verse in the Old Testament about understanding
the times and knowing what to do. It says…the men of Issachar understood the
times and they knew what to do. About
two weeks before the accident this verse jumped out at me when I was looking
through a Beth Moore bible study I had done.
It beat in my chest like a drum beat for the next two weeks. I found myself praying relentlessly that I
would understand the times and know what to do.
The night before the accident I shared it with Cameron- that this verse
and prayer had gripped my heart. I
prayed it without knowing why or what it was about.
And then she died.
October 8th, 2010. A
date etched in blood in my heart and mind.
Suddenly the season changed.
It snuck up on me and took me by surprise. After a long battle with secondary
infertility, we had just had the thrill of our lives in July to discover we were
pregnant with twins! Indescribable joy…
and maybe a little physical exhaustion! Around
twelve weeks pregnant I started to hemorrhage- ironically as I was parking for
an appointment with the neonatal specialist.
Makiah was with me, and I was scared.
I can’t describe the nauseous anxiety as we waited for the ultrasound
that day. The babies were alive and well,
but I had a hematoma. The doctor said it
was connected to the placenta of the baby on top. He didn’t think she would make it. And if I lost her, he said I would lose the
one underneath as well. Makiah was
excited to see the babies and to be the first to hear that they were likely girls. I was shaking in my boots.
We went home and I plopped myself on the couch were I would
stay for several weeks. You can read
about what Makiah did here if you like.
Somewhere in there I had a dream that was basically a warning sort of
dream. I thought that it was about the
babies because of the bleeding. I knew
we were under attack, and I prayed like I had never prayed before. And well, I had a lot of time to do that
since I pretty much wasn’t moving.
Finally, the bleeding miraculously subsided, and the week of fall break
came. I was a week away from a doctor’s
appointment where I hoped I would be cleared to go back to work. We went with my in-laws to the beach for the
week of the break. I never actually went
down on the beach. I sat mostly at the
condo reading books on parenting twins and watching my sweet girl play with her
daddy in the sand and waves.
And then the trip home.
The longest, most horrible trip of my life. The one with the detour to the hospital and
the proclamation by the doctors that my baby girl was gone. When we finally pulled into the driveway in
the wee hours of the morning, we were no longer the family of three that had
left the beach the morning before. They
sent us home without her. Forever.
And I entered a winter that was the coldest, bleakest,
darkest season of my life to date.
Nothing was off the table in terms of questions. There was so much pain to wade through that
it was a while before I began to wrestle with my prayer to understand the times
and know what to do. Everything seemed
to scream that I had failed. I had not
understood the times, and clearly I had made the wrong choice somewhere. When tragedy pounces on you, it is easy to
feel that we should have had the ability of God to see the future and somehow
made some different choice that would have changed our circumstances. I played every detail of that day and all the
things we could have done differently over and over in my mind a million times
and a million ways. I won’t know the answers for sure until I get
to heaven. But I know this tragedy was
uninvited.
Fast forward almost eight years to a conference we just hosted
at the church. Pastor David Garcia was
the speaker. He also happens to be very
special to us because he is the pastor who dedicated Makiah to the Lord with us
when she was a baby. He talked about
being grounded in the word. He shared
about the parable of the men whose homes were hit by the storm. You know, the one where the guy whose house
was built on the rock of Jesus did not collapse while the man whose house was
on sand was washed away. He said one
thing you cannot do is prevent the river of adversity from coming. The flood will come and there is nothing you
can do to stop it, he said. Jesus
promised us trouble in this world, but he also promised us that He has overcome
the world.
And somehow when he spoke, a weight lifted off of me. I had shared that same parable with Cameron
in the car just minutes before the accident.
That both the believer and unbeliever were hit with a flood. But I hadn’t considered that the flood was
out of their control. Nothing they could
have done would have changed it.
Understanding the times and knowing what to do didn’t mean our fate was
in my hands. It meant I needed to see
that it was the enemy who brings darkness and in my season of winter I needed
to run or weep or scream or however it came out Towards and not away from the God who made me and loved me and gave
me the promise that He has overcome this world.
He hasn’t set this world straight yet. He didn’t make that claim. But He has promised that He will. And He has
made a way for the kingdom of God to invade our domain as we invite Him in. I am not a fatalist. I believe that God speaks in dreams and
visions and that our prayers can change things.
There are too many stories where that has happened. But sometimes the change we want is not the
change we get. Sometimes the warning is
for our souls and not for the outward appearance. Sometimes it is for the spiritual battle and
not the earthly battle. I wanted it to
be different for me. But it wasn’t. This is the story I have been given. And ultimately we aren’t called to write our
own story, but to Trust the One is the author and the finisher of our faith
with even the things we cannot understand.
If we have no mystery, if we can explain it all, then we have no need
for God.
I believe God has answered that prayer the Holy Spirit gave
me to pray with fervency over my heart for the two weeks before she died. I believe understanding the times meant to
throw myself with whatever little strength I could muster on the grace and
mercy of God and not on my own
understanding. I believe knowing what to
do meant that I was called to declare the truth and goodness of God in the face
of opposing circumstances.
Today is Makiah’s 8th heaven day. I do not deny that it was the most terrible,
pivotal day in my life. But sitting here
8 years later- and yes, typing in Panera so that I am forced not to lose it in
public- I can honestly say that I would never trade the gift of her four short
years for anything- even for a life without pain. It has been the greatest invitation I have
received to look beyond what my eyes can see and to listen with my heart. It is true what has been said… it is better
to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all. Especially, when the promise of God is that
this is only the introduction to the story He is writing. I don’t know how many more heaven days we
will walk through, but I do know that an eternity of together days await.
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| Rainbow Toes for Makiah |
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