Oh Hubie.I don't know if it'll ever get easier. Sitting with a family, explaining that the hope I told them to cling to is fading fast. Watching that single, silent tear track down a mama's cheek to hit the floor with a tiny splash. Pulling back blankets to let a papa touch his baby's foot before he rushes out into the evening, unwilling to sit vigil with his wife, his hard eyes suspiciously red.
It's so hard to pray for God's will to be done when I'm getting more and more convinced that His will isn't what I want.
So when I say Pray for Hubert, I mean so much more than that. I mean pray for his mama, because now, maybe so close to the end, she finally cares, and if he does go back to Jesus, it's going to hurt her. I mean pray for the doctors. We don't have a PICU doctor on the ship, so we've been pulling from the jumbled expertise of everyone around, doing the best we can. I mean pray for the nurses. We've been letting Hubie get a firm hold on our hearts for the past month, and now he's so sick, and we don't know what to do. It's so hard to look at a baby who was getting better, getting fat and happy, and see him pinned to the bed by tubes and wires, his little body shaking with each breath of the ventilator.
I keep praying for God to fill me back up, with love and strength and wisdom, so that I can go back into that room tomorrow and pour myself out again.
I'm starting to think I might be a little too broken to hold all that right now.
This is a very good exerpt from a book that really impacted how I view Jesus Christ. I hope that this gives you strength to face another day.
“The death of Jesus was qualitatively different from any other death. The physical pain was nothing compared to the spiritual experiences of cosmic abandonment. Christianity alone among the world religions claims that God became uniquely and fully human in Jesus Christ and therefore knows firsthand despair, rejection, loneliness, poverty, bereavement, torture, and imprisonment. On the cross he went beyond even the worst human suffering and experienced cosmic rejection and pain that exceeds ours as infinitely as his knowledge and power excels ours. In his death, God suffers in love, identifying with the abandoned and godforsaken. Why did he do it? The Bible says that Jesus came on a rescue mission for creation. He had to pay for our sins so that someday he can end evil and suffering without ending us. … If we again ask the question: ‘Why does God allow evil and suffering to continue?’ and we look at the cross of Jesus, we still do not know what the answer is. However, we know what the answer isn’t. It can’t be that he doesn’t love us. It can’t be that he is indifferent or detached from our condition. God takes our misery and suffering so seriously that he was willing to take it on himself. … So, if we embrace the Christian teaching that Jesus is God and that he went to the Cross, then we have deep consolation and strength to face the brutal realities of life on earth.”
-Timothy Keller, The Reason For God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism (New York City: Dutton, 2008) p. 30.