Sweetness, pain and ordinary blessings

There is something about the sweetness of life that causes me a deep and gnawing pain in my gut. Life is so fleeting, and I only really have this moment--nothing else is guaranteed.

This has been a hard week and a half but it's been filled with sweet moments. My daughter got sick while I was out of town. I could only listen to the concern in my husband's voice on my cell phone as I was desperately trying to fly back home. My short flight home was delayed an hour and a half (longer than flight itself would take) and the turbulence awakened my deep-seated fears of flying. I imagined the plane resting in God's hand like a toy. How else do those aircraft stay up anyway? The driving rain that met me on touchdown was nothing compared to the tears that streamed down my face as I discovered my little three year old would be undergoing surgery that very night and I would need to rush to see her before she went under. The hour long drive was complicated by a terrible storm and and the darkness of a badly lit highway. I was so grateful that I did not have to drive myself-I surely would have ended up in a ditch after feeling that I had narrowly escaped a plane crash.

I arrived just twenty minutes before her surgery. I cradled her in my arms even as she whined and complained about the pain in her belly caused by a ruptured appendix. The anaesthesiologist gave her a tranquilizer that allowed her to relax and come back to herself a bit before she was sedated. We were able to sing together and laugh with my husband standing nearby, my one true love that I barely greeted in my haste to hold my youngest child. To be able to rock her in my arms and sing with her before she went under was an unbearably sweet moment for which I was so grateful. I worked very hard to keep my voice steady and to not let her see tears slipping from my eyes. I smiled at her broadly even as I sang so that she would hear it in my voice even as she rested her head upon my breast. As my husband went into the operating room with her to hold her hand until she shut her little eyes, I broke down and cried again silently so that she would not hear me.

Once my husband and I were in the waiting area, we just held each other and cried. In the midst of that awful fear we had the sweetness of clinging to one another to remind us that we were not alone in this. Our friends and church family rallied around us this week in wonderful ways and helped us to focus our energy on the little one and not to worry about the others. The older kids also visited her frequently so that they had a sense of belonging in the midst of our family crisis.

Thanks be to God that she is well on the mend now and we are all together. The ordinariness of our days now is unbearably sweet, especially as I think of how different things could be. God is the God of the small, the mundane, the blessedly ordinary.

Micah Girl