In Faith

Ok, so maybe an Apple iPad can replace my trusted PC on certain occasions when a desire to blog calls me away from a time of trials and misgivings. It feels weird; I have no spell check or grammatical test points. I have to be careful with semi-colons, because I cannot use those double-dashes I love so well. The actual posting online may yet prove to be my undoing, but I'll cross that bridge when I get there.

The thought for me today is this: it should have been me. It's almost not fair in all of its dubious simplicity. The world is set, and spins within a realm of the constant and known; while the events of the past week make no sense to me at all.

As I sit here in this sterile hospital room, delicately plucking on a pop-up keypad, my wife lays fitfully asleep in the bed before me. With a tenuous at best grip on what is left of her health, I pause incredulously in a wonder that escapes the limits of my careful comprehension. It should be me lying there, breathing processed oxygen with metered fluids injected patently through tubes embedded cruelly within my wrists.

I'm the abuser when it comes to health and well being. I ride the wagon of fatty foods and nicotine consumption. I work out in a gym almost daily, but I undo the benefits gained with a propensity for falling semi-consciously into a recliner when I arrive home from work each day. Everything I find the 'one I love' going through, I've written with zeal a payment in full for what I've earned through sordid habits and a careless lifestyle. But she hasn't...

I can do nothing about it, seemingly, and instead I'm left to grasp at seven-dollar words related to me by callous (sometimes) doctors and their much too cheerful nurses.

So I pray for answers and for strength; hers not mine. I pray for my children, suddenly called upon to adapt to situations well beyond their years. I pray to a powerful G_d Who could reach down with matchless grace and heal her, in a manner which to the One who created the stars would find a mere, fleeting pittance. Yet perhaps most of all, I pray for understanding and guidance for myself, along with a deeper faith.

The result of these earnest prayers as well as a heart forged by belief is this: I know it will be alright. Beginning with today, and greater still tomorrow and the day after. We'll finish that interrupted bar-b-cue as a family, and we'll praise Him with humbled awe as we do so.

I have a promise, you see. In His Words of Life He assures me that I am to begin my facing of these circumstances by "casting all your care upon Him; for He careth for you." From a wealth of timeless experience I know that this will prove to be just enough. In fact, I can state with a calm assurance that I know these unknown and unexplainable things as simplistic fact. It will stand as a witness, a sentinel even, to be all that we ever needed by the time we gaze upon the conclusion of the matter.