Well, endurance in prayer is sometimes a difficult thing. This last hospitalization of Melissa’s brought it home. You pray and pray and… nothing. You get tired. Demoralized. Wondering if there is any point. You blandly assure yourself about the dark night of the soul, that God has enough faith in you that you’ll make it. But that’s not making as much sense as it did when the suffering was less intense, and ideas were ok.
But as I have said before, the philosophical/theological answers to the problem of evil don’t do much in the moment of suffering. You need something you can take with you into the concentration camp, and it ain’t modal logic, or the metaphysics of consciousness. The only thing you can take to such places is the Cross. It is the answer to the problem of evil. It atones for sin, it shows His knowledge of and solidarity with our suffering. It goes all the places we cannot, is in all the places we fear most, laying waste to the plans of evil.
So when it came to crunch time, a holding cross was the answer. One of our buds at Christ Church, Sharon Perkins, gave Melissa a holding cross, a piece of maple carved into something like a cross, but the bars are offset somewhat so that you can hold it in your hand.
We misplaced it when she got out last summer. I ordered another one for her and it came just in time.
Melissa said that this was going to be her seminary. She said this last year, before the transplant. I wondered about that, because, well, I went to the school of hard knocks, and that was ok, expected (my grandfather’s prophetic words when I was about 5). But Bone Marrow Transplant Seminary? That seems harsh.
But at the end of the day, that’s what it’s been. She said she was just waiting, going thru it all, waiting to see. And what came of it, a few days before she left the hospital was a spurt of planning, a spurt of thinking about how much she wants to be part of the church, to jump into our emphasis on children. She said one day she just started making plans and realized that after all the waiting, God was prompting her to start thinking about the future.
Sometimes, when you can’t pray, it’s not just that others are praying for you, it’s also that God’s purposes are in effect.
2 comments:
Very interesting blog.
Kisses
Hi! I'm a fellow Lexington resident who has Hodgkin Lymphoma (actually I just achieved remission, but I've been dealing with it for a little over a year) I followed a link from The Mother Tongue looking for something to read. I wondered if you knew about the BBS at the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society? It has a lot of good info, and a pretty good community. If you ever have a question or need to vent, there's always someone to answer/listen. Give it a read.
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