Of Independence, Never Graduating, And Needing An Apron

For months, I’ve been searching for the words to adequately, appropriately share what has been a significant chapter for our family: selling our condo and buying a house.  It has been an up-and-down, stressful, crazy, unbelievable journey that has pushed us to the edge of what we thought we were capable of handling again and again.  More than once, I’ve come to the computer and searched for the right words and a way (any way) to organize my thoughts.  Today, I rediscovered these paragraphs that I’d scribbled down about two months ago when the condo finally sold.  It sold and I felt released in my words and thoughts.  Within four weeks of that time, we’d close on our first house, and within 24 hours of closing, I’d get the call about Chase’s MRI, proving yet again that there is no time when we reach a place of independence…

The post I’ve been wanting to write just hasn’t been formulating properly for some time.  Mental distractions abound: children crying and always needing, the friend having surgery, the cancer child friend of Chase’s that’s been rushed to the hospital after a 45 minute seizure, the therapy appointments and radiation follow ups and the text from my spouse saying he almost ran out of gas on the way to work.

The thought of Susanna Wesley putting her apron over her head for a moment of prayer begins to sound better and better.  If only I could find my apron…

And the crazy irony of a week like this is that I’ve walked the halls of hospitals and begged God to spare my son’s life.

I’ve come to realize in the last several months that I expected to “graduate” the trial of brain cancer treatment at a “brain cancer level” of trust in the sovereignty of God, and yet, here I am, yet again, throwing my hands in the air over so many things that I can’t control – and feeling hard-hearted and bitter that God won’t let me control them in the ways I see fit and then move past them forever and check them neatly off my life list as accomplished.

There is no graduation.  There is no time when we reach independence.  Just because we went through a hard thing and survived does not mean that it won’t be equally hard the next time we’re faced with it.   In fact, it may very well be more hard the next time.  We will never reach a moment when we aren’t in desperate need of salvation and grace.

When the house you thought you sold is going back on the market again, or the house you’ve wanted to put an offer on gets further away and more inaccessible, and the summer lags and there are no answers for Fall and school… somehow, at times, those are the days when it’s shamefully harder to cope than the cancer days.  How do the little things hurt worse than the big ones?  Salvation.  Grace.

For there is no time when we reach independence.

Thank you, Lord.

Moment by moment.

“Therefore I tell you, do not be anxious about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, nor about your body, what you will put on. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? Look at the birds of the air: they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? And which of you by being anxious can add a single hour to his span of life?” Matthew 6:25-27