Another Day in ICU

Chris is stable this morning, nothing improved overnight but nothing got worse. His pulse is a little high but that's apparently a side effect of some drugs. His platelets went down and that's apparently a side effect of being so sick. And I waffle between tears and smiles when doctors talk. I hang on every word, I ask a lot of questions and I have been met with tremendous grace.

Dr. Roper is the ICU doctor here and I like him a lot. He's Southern, he's got a GREAT accent that reminds me of being a kid and he makes me feel safe. It makes me wonder if MY kids feel safe, then I wonder how can they, how can they live normal lives when our lives are anything BUT normal. Eric's not in school, none of the social workers here think he should be, his school agrees and understands, I don't think he should be, Chris needs him here and more importantly Eric wants to be here. That's not normal but it's all we have.

Emily goes to class across the street and comes back and forth. Other freshman go to student dining and talk about mixers and parties and where they are going on Friday night but Emily comes to Swedish, she eats hospital food, she naps on a cot in her dad's room and does her homework on her laptop with the hospital's wireless connection. That's not normal either.

And I spend my days torn between motherhood and being a wife. I can't leave and yet I can't watch monitors so I choose to pray, to read, write and talk to Chris. And none of that is normal either. But this is where we are and this is where God meets us, amidst the not normal, amidst our worries and our tears, amidst our impatience and our not understanding.

I went to sleep thinking about Romans and patience building perseverance and wanting so badly to learn patience quickly and realizing how ridiculous that concept really is and having to step back and say "Okay God, I get it, You want me to do this trust fall here and give up the having to know and give up the having to have some control and learn that control is sin in my life and that surrender is the path to closeness with You."

Why didn't anyone cover this part in Sunday School or maybe they did and I was so busy coloring my leaflet and trying to make Joseph's coat prettier than the next girl's that I didn't realize. I look at the scriptures with new eyes suddenly...real people, scared and worried and desperately wanting normal and finding that God had another plan and both wanting to serve God but wanting to maintain some control. Because control is what human beings want and do and crave and I'm realizing it's of Satan not of God. Control never was ours to start with when it comes down to it. So I'm once again surrendering this morning to a God that knows this story, even before we knew there WAS a story. A story that God knows the beginning, end and middle of and one in which I fall but don't even have a script with my lines so I'm stumbling around the stage not knowing where I fit in. And yet I do. I fit in. And God will feed me the lines when it's my time to know them. Maybe He was all along, I was just too busy editing.