say what
When I open the email about Adam’s blood work, I have just finished telling the Lord that I don’t understand why everything always has to be so hard. I know that everything and always are sweeping, emotional words, but God is a sweeping, omniscient God who doesn’t need me to “pretty up” my feelings. I’ve just written it out carefully, I don’t understand why everything always has to be so hard, but I trust You, when suddenly I remember the email from Adam’s endocrinologist, regarding his recent lab work, still sitting in my inbox. I click it open, expecting nothing out of the ordinary, expecting the usual normal ranges and negative screenings.
“Expect only hesed,” Ann Voskamp warns in her Holy Spirit-driven fire-flash of a book, Waymaker, speaking of God’s “forever covenantal, always unconditionally, unwaveringly loyal, kind love of inseparable bonding, of divine family, of eternal attachment.” She explains, “The moment you let go of your expectations, much suffering lets go of you…. Expect nothing but hesed—because this turns out to be everything (24-47).”
Our relationship with this doctor is new, and already I like her personal style. She has written her own email, mentioning the status of a prescription before launching into a discussion of his lab results. What follows is a reporting of numbers, most of which I wouldn’t understand except that she keeps using the phrase within in the normal range, until I reach a paragraph that begins, but he did have a positive result for Celiac. That word but can be like a hidden, hairpin bend in The River.
I fly up out of a cozy curl into a full-on foot-planted ready position, and say, incredulously, “What,” which immediately draws Kevin’s attention.
“What?” He repeats after me. “What happened?”
In the Old Testament, when the wilderness-wandering Israelites groaned in fear, wondering “What will we eat out here in the desert,” God fed them bread from heaven, which they called manna. He fed them manna for years, just enough for each day, to meet their needs. It was their daily bread and a daily opportunity to trust in God. In Hebrew, the word manna literally means, “What is it?” The what that can feel like it will be our undoing can become our wonder over God’s faithful care.
“Our Adam. Our sweet, skinny, quiet Adam, the one who can least understand; our Adam has tested positive for Celiac.” I can’t help it; my voice wobbles.
“What?” Kevin asks again, but it’s really only the echo of our voices as we grab hands, the way we’ve always done, and careen down into the rapids together.
Immediately, I begin to forecast what this diagnosis will mean that we will have to do to survive.
“I’m going to ask her if there are false positives,” I say, almost parenthetically, speaking of our doctor, “but you realize, this will mean we have to become a gluten-free household? Because Adam isn’t going to understand.” I repeat this, for the third and then a fourth time, because clearly for me, it’s a sticking point. “Adam isn’t going to understand. He isn’t going to understand why he can’t eat anything with gluten in it.”
I am processing aloud that if Adam has Celiac this will be one more battleground upon which Kevin and I will have to fight for Adam’s health, because Adam will not comprehend why he needs to do that for himself. It’ll be one more circumstance that keeps Adam forever reliant on our care and the care of others, and sometimes I can’t reconcile how I feel about that with what God has been opening my eyes to see.
Everything God has done for me has been so that I will turn to Him and receive His love and embrace my full reliance on Him and be with Him forever. In light of this, He keeps asking me gently, in response to my many prayers, if it’s really such a terrible thing that Adam will always be with us, that Adam knows he always needs us. Isn’t Adam only receiving God’s hesed through us?
Kevin only shakes his head. This is not the first time we’ve rushed down The River and crashed into a rock. It takes a minute, when you’re suddenly holding on for dear life and soaked from head to toe, to get a good view of what’s actually holding you steady.
I’ve just been telling God, I don’t know why everything always has to be so hard, but I trust you, and I haven’t gotten to the part yet where I figure out that this is another opportunity to practice that trust.
In the first moments after the unexpected happens, you forget where you are at first. You flail around, reaching for something—anything–to stop your mad progress, thinking that it’s up to you, with your slippery fingers and weak arms. How how how thunders through your mind like it’s your galloping heartbeat, but for us, God has always been the only answer to that beating question. That word but can also be the powerful, faithful, immovable, eternal fact of God, the Rock, keeping us right where we need to be.
“Well,” Kevin finally says, quietly, thoughtfully, “if it turns out to be so, God will see us through this, just as He sees us through everything else.”
I sit back, suddenly also hearing my own words, the ones I’d prayed just before I opened that email from the doctor.
But I trust You.
“Yes. Yes, He will,” I say slowly, because this is a truth we’ve lived repeatedly for years, a truth I know because I know God intimately.
I expect hesed, because God’s love has covered me, has crowned me, has followed me every day of my life, in every circumstance and in every season, not because of who I am or anything I’ve ever done, but because that’s who He is, and yes, it turns out that’s everything.
