Dead Birds

(*Ghost Subscribers: I have moved my subscriber list over to Substack. So you will get this post twice...just this once. From now on, posts from me will come from Substack. Same deal...free, comes to your email. Just might looks slightly different. I'm actually not exactly sure why I switched platforms other than a lot of people told me to. So I did. Merry Christmas, friends.)

It's one of those days that is just seared into my memory. I can still feel it in my bones. 

The days in the hospital had ticked into July after a May surgery. It was a Sunday afternoon and we were wheeling Quincy down the long hallway to the OR for an emergency type intervention…again…to try and save the original surgical repairs. We had done this a number of times before at this point. 10-year-old Quincy was beyond exhausted, beyond frustrated and beyond angry. We had already missed a long-anticipated family vacation and I had not yet had the heart to tell him that at this point there was no way he was making basketball tryouts in a couple of weeks. We were hanging on by a thread.

It was a Sunday, the doctors had been called in from their couches and the hospital halls were empty. We got to the OR doors where I was to leave him and Quincy said, “Can you just do it, Mom? These people obviously don’t know what they are doing?” Everyone gave him a “fair enough” grin, I kissed his forehead, and the OR doors closed. There was no one there to give me a pager and usher me to a waiting room. So I just turned around, walked two steps, slid down the cement wall of the empty hallway and wept.

I had no words left. No prayers left. What are we even doing here, Lord? This is clearly a futile exercise of me pleading with you. So silence it was.

I must have been there an hour or so before someone walked by and asked if I was lost. I said nope. Just waiting for my kid. She was like, “Oh. Um. OK. Usually we don’t wait two feet outside the door of the operating room.”

I eventually found my way to the PACU to greet him coming out of anesthesia. I remember the nurse being so relieved to hear that his nephrostomy tubes were temporary. She said, “I took one look at him and thought, “Things are not looking good for this kid.”

She thought he was dying.

This is the picture from that day in the PACU.

Staring into space.

We were spent.

We needed rescue.

But what do we do?

Because I didn’t know how to say it, but what I was learning was that God cannot be trusted.

God cannot be trusted to keep my kid safe.

I’ve been living in a Children's hospital, for crying out loud.

Look around.

God cannot be trusted to keep the kids safe. He cannot be trusted to stop the suffering.

Having a front-row seat to this for 15 years will do a number on a girl and her faith.

I have said for years that I wanted to write a book called “Dead Birds.” It would be a reflection on the verse to “consider the sparrows” and the Father’s care for them and that I was taking heed to that and finding a lot of dead birds.

This weekend I read Tish Warren’s book, A Prayer in the Night. I feel like she wrote this book to me. (It’s basically her version of Dead Birds but a much more theologically sound and beautifully written version.)

I have yet to fully unpack it because first of all I can't even think about it without my eyes welling up. And if I dare to try and talk about it, I literally burst into tears. This is not an exaggeration.

But a couple things I’m leaning in on during Advent.

In light of the unsolvable mystery of pain and a good God we must look to the story for the answer.

A story that begins in Bethlehem.

Love is going to have a word here.

It’s a baby so we are going to have to pay attention to its whisper.

But it’s going to rumble here in a minute at the cross.

Tim Keller says, “at the cross of Jesus, we still do not know the answer (to suffering). However, we know what the answer isn’t. It can’t be that he doesn’t love us.”

And today we wait between the already and the not yet.

We sit in the mystery.

He cannot be trusted to keep us safe.

Yet faith believes that He can be trusted to have the final word.

And in the hallways of Childrens hospitals we can borrow the words and the faith of a church that has long endured this paradox. Warren says, “Christians have always known the reality of pain…Yet, millions of faithful have long held stubbornly to this antinomy: God is good and powerful, and terrible things regularly happen in the world. The church has always known this paradox, but instead of resolving its tension, it has let it persist. We have left this chord humming in dissonance over thousands of years, always believing that it will be resolved when God himself sounds the final consonant note.”

From them, we can pray these borrowed words, as I can attest that our own words do in fact run out:

“Keep watch, dear Lord, with those who work, or watch, or weep this night, and give your angels charge over those who sleep. Tend the sick, Lord Christ; give rest to the weary, bless the dying, soothe the suffering, pity the afflicted, shield the joyous; and all for your love’s sake. Amen”

For at the end of the day sometimes I believe, or some days I borrow the “we believe” that He is keeping watch.

He is drawing near.

I envision him 2 feet outside the door.

Waiting for his kids.

Drawing as close as possible.

And when the time comes, the doors will swing open and He will…

Heal every body.

Set every last thing right.

Love will have the final word.