To catch up on the previous posts about our SCIDS journey click here.
It’s that moment after something big & amazing has happened...but the world still looks the same.
In my heart I know God had stopped the virus. I can see the physical effects as they begin to decrease her ventilator pressures and her oxygen by teeny bits. Her “numbers” are looking slightly better (they really just aren’t getting worse). These are such small improvements, but it is a totally different track than yesterday. Today the team isn’t talking about her condition escalating, they aren’t trying to brainstorm ideas about what else to do, they are talking about different problems, new challenges.
She is quite puffy looking today. All that fluid could cause more trouble for her lungs, so they start her on a constant infusion of medication to get rid of the fluid.
Getting rid of the fluid was great, but now her blood pressure starts to drop...that’s not great. So they start her on another continuous infusion of medication to keep her blood pressure up. One thing causes another. Put out one fire, then another starts.
Ugh, the complications.
I just wish it could all be over now.
If God had healed her, why couldn’t it be finished? Why couldn’t her lungs just return to normal and we could just go on and get out of here, back home to our ‘normal’ life?
It’s the tension of living in the now and the not yet.
These new challenges are hard. She’s not “out of the woods” yet. It’s only been 5 days, but it feels longer...much longer. I want to anticipate everything being ok and getting out of ICU, but the weight of complications, decision-making and the gravity of her condition seems to cloud the hope.
We learn to live inside this tension, that as we love and follow Jesus with our lives, the promises of scripture tell us we have been saved, we have been forgiven, we have been made righteous, we are sealed with the Holy Spirit. This is the now.
The tension we begin to see, is that it’s not over yet. After our lives are committed to Christ, we don’t go immediately to heaven. There is a working out of our salvation that continues to happen. There is sin and temptation we continue to battle, there is a call on our lives to glorify God and grow His kingdom. We persevere in the midst of the struggles we face, in relationships, our physical health and difficult circumstances.
We can succumb to despair and lose hope. We can become blinded by our feelings and our circumstances. David Platt reminds us that, “Disciples like Peter, Andrew, James, and John show us that the call to follow Jesus is not simply an invitation to pray a prayer; it is a summons to lose our lives.” (What Did Jesus Really Mean When He Said Follow Me?).
Having received our salvation in the present, we long for the consummation of our salvation in the return of Christ. We wait. We live today as we anticipate what is yet to come, with our eyes set on Him, not on ourselves. When we view our lives as surrendered to Christ, we have the opportunity to see our circumstances through His eyes rather than our own, to trust that His hand is at work.
Athanasius of Alexandria, a 4th century church father writes, “We are agreed that a dead person can do nothing: yet the Savior works mightily every day, drawing men to religion, persuading them to virtue, teaching them about immortality, quickening their thirst for heavenly things, revealing the knowledge of the Father, inspiring strength in face of death, manifesting Himself to each, and displacing the irreligion of idols; while the gods and evil spirits of the unbelievers can do none of these things, but rather become dead at Christ’s presence, all their ostentation barren and void.” (On the Incarnation).
This is part of our hope, that in the waiting, God is doing something. Every. Day.
Her healing is a reminder to me that, yes she is healed now, but we are living through the complications of “not yet”. It is a struggle. We can’t foresee the effects of the complications, she could take a turn for the worse again. It’s learning to trust that the time we spend in the struggle, is doing something in us, drawing us deeper to Him.
Can you trust God in the midst of your struggles? In your circumstances, have you surrendered your life to Him?
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