A Rememberance

Job 1:21  "The Lord gives, and the Lord takes away.  Blessed is the Name of the Lord."

She doesn't like me to talk about it.  Gets quite angry when I do so...I just put it down there in the deep.  Store it up.  But here we are three years later, and I still have nights like this when I wake up sobbing.  Nightmare images of her lying in that bed with a tube coming out her throat.  Tubes coming out everywhere.  Heart monitor.  Blood pressure monitor.  Blue compression leggings to keep her from developing blood clots.  My very own daughter standing on the edge of death. All the life in her eyes and face drained.  Gone.  Her voice is flat when she says that God has abandoned her.  She says that she doesn't care what happens to her now.  

The Shoulders and I stop saying her name.  She is our dead girl in the bed.  For all his strength, my husband is beaten, and we stand in that room clinging to each other.  Mourning the loss of a daughter. Thirteen years old.

Thank God for my mama.  She holds that big man as if he were her own son, and he weeps in her arms wrapped tight.  He is going to lose another little girl.  It seems too hard.  Too unfair. 

It crosses our minds.  We belong to the all powerful God Who is right now choosing to allow this in our daughter's life.  In our lives.  That He would let our little girl, who loves Jesus with all her heart, feel abandoned by Him.  Left.  Cast aside.  Facing death alone.  Jesus becomes the bitter pill we must swallow because WE BELIEVE.

This is our God.

We wheel her down to the surgery bay for her second go at rectifying this appendix gone so wrong.  She is emaciated under those white sheets.  Face white too.  Green.  Shadow of death the only thing written on her skin.  The doctor and the anesthesiologist talk with my husband while I stand and hold her hand.  This one who gave me life when she entered the world.  A dream come true from the very first breath.  

They take her away, and the Shoulders and I stand sobbing together in the hall.  He holds me so hard my glasses get crushed into my face, but I don't care.  Give me some pain I can handle.  In that terrible moment, we know that we have lost her.    

Unbearable.

But she does come back to us, and that "bitter pill" works His medicine.  She is a child spared TWICE  from death.  She begins to wonder why God would allow her to feel the way Jesus felt on the cross, and she takes that into her heart as a privilege.  This girl identifies with Christ in His suffering.  This is a girl, a rare girl, whose faith has been tested by real fire.   Ours too.

Recovery still in process,

Bernadette