Sometimes it isn’t the actual doing of things that is hard, but it’s the thinking about doing things that lays us out on the floor and oddly teaches us dependence.
Chase has his first of two eye surgeries tomorrow (Friday), and we’re all a bit of a wreck over it. Which is ironic when you consider all he’s had done over the years. To have gone from major, major brain surgery with half his head lying open to fearing a simple outpatient surgery on one eyeball – that same procedure that very likely half the population over age 60 has done – it doesn’t make sense, does it? But fear never does make sense.
We are desperately out of practice with surgeries. Chase hasn’t had a single procedure for nearly two years, and so the thinking of tomorrow – even when we rehearse being strong and of good courage because God is with us – it’s been laying us out, or driving us up a wall.
Carrying this on his heart finally culminated yesterday morning in a knock-down, drag-out, complete and total refusal to get on the bus. He lay down on the sidewalk, and then he ran for the door and wouldn’t let go of the handle, and then he made it in the house and took a standoff posture in the living room, followed by clinging to the bannister while I tried to carry him down the stairs, and finally, a star-like posture with his arms and legs against either side of the doorway while I tried to get him outside again. This kid, he knows how to fight. You get the idea…
Right now, it sounds a little hilarious and completely like something out of a Calvin and Hobbes cartoon, but in that minute when he was screaming and pulling my hair, and the bus driver was honking and frowning at me, and I was pretty sure one of the drivers in the halted cars on either side of the street was about to call child services on the whole spectacle, it was awful, and I could feel myself sweating and freaking out right along with Chase.
He missed the bus and the morning got completely thrown off, but it ended up being the best thing that could have happened because I got him to one of his “safe zones” – the places he can escape to when he’s really worked up – and I wrapped him in his favorite, old blanket, and when he was finally still, we talked.
“Surgery.” He only spoke one word and his poor, broken eyes welled up with tears.
He recoiled as I began to speak comfort and logic and interrupted frantically, “But are they going to take my eyeballs out??”
Oh dear ones, I’ve said it before and I’m saying it again now because it took Chase in tears with secret, crazy fears and sitting under a surgery shadow again to make me realize afresh how desperately I needed to slow down and just be in the moment by moment grace of life. Sometimes, we all just need to sit down and reassure somebody that no matter how bad it all feels, our eyeballs are still going to be in our heads at the end of the day (or whatever your equivalent of this scenario might be).
Life is too important and too short to worry about what we look like to others or what happens to our perfectly planned days when the unexpected shows up at our door. (or ninja-refuses to step outside our door)
It’s time to keep our eyeballs in our heads, breathe deep, and love those around us in need. And if you think of it, please pray for Chase as he goes back into the OR tomorrow.
Moment by moment.
“There are no words in any language that adequately express the emotion felt when hearing the phrase: “There’s a large mass”, no way to express the feelings that wash over the heart and mind when these words are spoken over the body of a two-year-old boy.