When The Music Stopped, Part Two

Yesterday I posted a part of an article my dad wrote after my mom had a serious heart attack two years ago. You can go here to read that first post.

Like I said yesterday, the Triple By-pass surgery Mom had was the easy part. She had a myriad of other complications including: pulmonary edema, kidney failure, blood clots and a very a bad reaction to an anticoagulant  drug. That somehow caused the tissue in her hands and feet to swell and even damaged the tissue in her toes to the point that they needed to be amputated.

These are the things my dad had to deal with for about four months. Here's Part Two of When The Music Stopped. (A couple of paragraphs are repeated from yesterday.)

I must confess that there were days and nights when the music stopped—repeated issues of pulmonary edema, kidney failure, constipation, then at 6:30 PM on October 28 watching her stop breathing, hearing the call for code blue, then seeing the pulse reading go from 53 to 35 to nothing… for a full four minutes. 

Would I be single again?  No one to share my life with!  Would there be brain damage?  I felt numb.  Was there a God?  How could I encourage my wife, when I was so empty?  Why not just crank up some happy thoughts like a Christian ought to do?

I was afraid.  I trusted God, I thought, but I was afraid.  I thought a Christian should not be afraid.  What is God up to? 

Psalm 56 provided encourgement.

When I am afraid, I put my trust in you,

            In God, whose word I praise—

In God I trust and am not afraid.

            What can mere mortals do to me?

At the very time when we are afraid, that is the time for trust!  Then I read this paragraph from a book called My Soul Waits to my wife: 

Usually in times when we are frightened, we try hard not to feel fear.  Attempting to push it under, however, can bring a volcanic explosion of panic or terror when we can no longer keep the lid on all that anxiety we’ve been struggling to keep corked.  This psalm, by contrast, suggests a healthier managing of emotions—dealing with fear by accepting its reality and learning to trust in the midst of it.”

Emotions run like a roller coaster.  Fear, anxiety, trust, doubt.  Is my hope merely wishful thinking?  Where is God?  Does God really know what is going on? 

Then we read Psalm 13. 

How long, Lord?  Will you forget me forever?

How long will you hide your face from me?

How long must I wrestle with my thoughts,

and day after day have sorrow in my heart?

How long will my enemy triumph over me?

Look on me, and answer, LORD my God.

Give light to my eyes, or I will sleep in death, and my enemy will say, “I have overcome him,” and my foes will rejoice when I fall.

But I trust in your unfailing love; my heart rejoices in your salvation.

I will sing the Lord’s praise, for he has been good to me.

I realized that as long as I wrestled with my own thoughts I would never be able to move beyond being numb.  I had to let God be God and discover the way of God. 

Closely allied with our fears is our doubt, our lack of trust.  I think both are very real to most of us.  Both urge us to take God seriously, to ask of God the hard questions, then depend on God in substantial ways.  Sorting through our fears and our doubts enable us to examine our beliefs and filter out our wishful thinking about God from the challenging wisdom of who is God.

But the down moments would continue as the toes turned into raisins and it was clear they would need to be amputated and the triple by-pass surgery was the easy part.

Together we read from Psalm 31.

But I trust in you, Lord;

I say, “You are my God.”

My times are in your hands.

Our trusting does not depend on how good we are at trusting—for we wavered.  Our trusting depends on the trustworthy Lord of the universe.  We cannot trust other so-called sources of security—that would be making a god out of whatever we thought might relieve our anxiety.

Psalm 31 continues:

In my alarm I said, “I am cut off from your sight!”

Yet you heard my cry for mercy when I called to you for help.

Panic prevents one from accurately assessing the situation. 

I don’t need this.  My church doesn’t need this!  How can I fulfill my call when there is so much distraction?  If only my wife’s health were just the by-pass surgery and not this other stuff.  Why can’t I have time to heal emotionally?  Why does all this stuff keep coming? 

“Wouldn’t it be good, we think, if we could choose our struggles and choose how it comes to us?” (My Soul Waits)

But I needed to choose to trust God even when I didn’t feel like it or even if it’s a struggle I don’t want to have.

It was Psalm 55 that enabled me to renew my trust.

As for me, I call to God and the Lord saves me.

Evening, morning and noon I cry out in distress, and he hears my voice…

Cast your cares on the Lord and he will sustain you; he will never let the righteous be shaken.

Several nights as I drove home from the hospital, I begged God, “Lord, have mercy on her!  Lord, have mercy on her!”  That was my “breath prayer” for the 15 minute drive through downtown, past churches, past the Dairy Queen.  Getting some peace by the time I was a few blocks from home. 

(Come back tomorrow for the conclusion)