When The Music Stopped, Part Three

This concludes the article written by my dad after my mom's heart attack two years ago.
(To read the first two parts go here and here.)

I identified with the Psalmist who is grieving and moaning, wailing with heavy hurt.  He does not cry out just once in a while, rather morning, noon and night.  It is an unceasing expression of woe regarding the sorrow of his suffering.

 I could do the same, and I did!

But note the words, “the Lord saves me” and “He hears my voice.”  We can trust our God’s promise that “He is active to transform circumstances to bring good out of evil." 

But it is almost too easy to recite that promise to others when one is still suffering from overwhelming, unhealed wounds.  That is religious phoniness. 

As long as our mind is not settled about an issue, we might as well be honest with God and with ourselves by pouring out our feelings about it.

Then on November 8,  I remember hearing a children’s message from 1 Thessalonians 5:18 about being commanded to be thankful in all circumstances, not necessarily for them.  The community of believers helped bring me back into discovering the way of God.  Isn’t that what the church is supposed to do?

Then I was assured that the Lord hears my voice.  We all know that when we complain continually to those around us, they get tired of listening and pretty well want to close their ears to our entreaty.

“In contrast the Lord will always listen to our cries, even if they are about the same subject for the billionth time.”

Being sustained by God is a way of saying we can endure.  It is the kind of support that begins the process of emotional healing. But the last part of the verse quoted, “He will never let the righteous be shaken/or moved” carries the connotation that it will not last forever.  We may fall, but we won’t be trampled in the dust when we are down. 

Last week as my wife was preparing for bed and looked at her toe-less feet she began quietly weeping.  Should I have told her that all things work together for those called by God, or should I have said, your tears are beautiful, for while your physical body has mostly healed, it seems apparent that your emotions are now catching up with the healing process?

The next night she claimed this verse from Psalm 119:92-93 as her own:

   If your law had not been my delight, I would have perished in my affliction.

  I will never forget your precepts, for by them you have preserved my life.

There is still the pain of what is happening to my best friend and soul mate of 57 years.   But now, I’ve begun to again appreciate how deeply I am loved by God and of the suffering involved in bearing the cost of loving. 

Some of the circumstances of life bring us happiness.  Others bring us deep sorrow and pain.  But both happiness and sorrow rest on the bedrock of this one fundamental fact:  it is true that Jesus Christ suffered, died and rose from the dead and demonstrated for all time our reconciliation to God.  God will never take His eye from us.  The face of God is always smiling upon you. 

Always!  

Amen.

Like I said, it's been two years since Mom first had the heart attack, since that night that she started having shortness of breath and couldn't call out to my dad who was upstairs in their house. She texted him on his cell-phone "Help". He came to see what was wrong and ended up taking her to the ER.

Mom has recovered. She has learned to walk without her toes. Here is a picture of my parents at my daughter's wedding a little more than a year ago. She wanted to dance and they practiced at home in their kitchen.

How sweet is God for giving them some more years together?

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)

When The Music Stopped Part One

Late one night two years ago this week, I received a phone call from my sister telling me the news that our mom had suffered a heart attack. What a scary phone call that was! We rushed to the hospital the next morning to see my mom in the ICU. She was so serious she had someone sitting at the foot of her bed through the night. I remember talking with her, reading a Psalm to her, telling her about a recent vacation (we were coming home from the vacation when we got the call).

As I was sorting through some old emails recently I came across one from my dad that had an article he had written attached to it. He had written this article about four months after that phone call from my sister. I asked him for permission to post his article here. I think the thought process of a spouse watched his beloved of 57 years struggle for her life is priceless. Maybe it will help a reader.

A little background:

Mom's heart attack resulted in Triple By-Pass surgery. The surgery turned out to be the easy part compared to several serious complications afterwards.

Here is Part One of my dad's article:

When the Music Stops

Do you remember the game musical chairs that we played as kids?  That’s where the chairs are all lined up in two rows, back to back with one less chair than the number of players.  The kids circle the chairs very cautiously because when the music stops everyone is to sit down in a chair.  And one person is always left out. In the next round, another chair is removed, until there is only one chair and two people.  One obviously got left out.  

It’s a game of losing, not winning.

As a kid we had to deal with the emotions of no chair, getting left out to stand by the wall and watch the others circle the chairs.

Maybe the game prepared us for being a grown-up because we can all think of times when the music stops—we are left out, left alone, we lost the game. 

I’ll guess that most everyone here has had some time in their life when the music stopped.  Maybe it was an illness that came on suddenly, a financial problem, a divorce you didn’t want.  Was it compassionate friends who think you should be “over” your loss now, or an envious liar who spread false rumors about you?  Or is it fears for the future or some misery from the past.  Is these days of economic distress and time pressures we all know those who are searching for work or some sort of security the world offers, yet keep coming up short. 

My wife and I have found quite a bit of consolation in the Psalms as we’ve been dealing with her heart attack and subsequent serious complications. 

I suggest that the Psalms are full of helps for us when the music stops.  There are a lot of images in the Psalms -- powerful, descriptive, suggestive images. Listen.

"My God is a strong rock.” “In the shadow of his rock I will rest." "In the shelter of His wings I will take refuge."

The images abound. God is seen as a safe harbor -- a shepherd's arms -- our life is one in which we pass through the valley of the shadow of death -- and we walk by still waters and rest in green pastures. The images are on every page. 

The Psalmist had visions and plans that often were often frustrated by his enemies to such an extent that David fears for his life.  These days our enemies are not usually people trying to harm us physically.  We might consider that they are those we experienced when the music stopped for us. 

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? 

I'll continue this over the next two days.... stay tuned.