Snowpocaplyse, Suffering and Other Instruments of Grace

 

So maybe you’ve been fighting the dark and the cold like some kind of polar vortex epic battle.

And maybe you’ve been feeling like maybe the dark was winning.

I think I can relate.

Maybe your days have been hard and depression has been lurking like some kind of stealthy snow fox and maybe for a while you might have lost your way in all that blinding blurring snow.

 

Well, there is hope for people like us.

People who sometimes get lost, and sometimes fall off the map, and sometimes can’t even remember what grace is let alone write about it and sometimes can’t even remember who they are.

There is hope.

When life turns you upside down and you can’t quite remember how to get back up, you can remember this….hope will find you.

When, the day before Thanksgiving, I found out I was pregnant with our seventh child, I have to be honest and say, the wind was knocked out of me.

And even for me who spent years working in the pro-life arena, advocating for women and for life, even I cried.

Because when I had my last baby, my sixth child, I almost died.

The birth of this fourth son of mine had been uncomplicated up until a couple hours afterward when the nurse took me to the bathroom and I passed out on her.  She had trouble bringing me back.  They didn’t quite know what was happening and it took a bit before they realized I was hemorrhaging and they couldn’t get the bleeding stopped.  I couldn’t stay conscious, and in the end they wheeled me in for emergency surgery to stop the bleeding.  As the doctor wheeled me in he leaned in close and tried to make me hear him tell me that he didn’t know if I would need a hysterectomy or if they could get the bleeding to stop at all and he needed to know that I understood.  I couldn’t talk in my semi-conscious state but I could hear.

Yes.  I understood.   I might not wake up from this.

And I prayed to live.  For the sake of these six kids and a baby I had hardly even held, that I might have more time to disciple them, to love them, to tell them about God's grace.

And I did wake up on earth and without a hysterectomy.

And not too little loss of blood.  They say that the average person has about 8 pints of blood in their body and if you lose more than 4, you’re dead.  At least that what Wiki-answers says.  I lost 4.6 pints.

They gave me transfusions but still it took six months for me to fully regain my strength.  Six months of weakness while still raising six kids, homeschooling them, caring for a newborn, cleaning, cooking meals, and just trying to make it through each day.

The doctor who did my emergency surgery had said that if I had another baby, I would hemorrhage again.  I would like to think that that is just his opinion.

We had thought that maybe we were done having kids.  This past fall I struggled with months of pain from my endometriosis, a ruptured cyst on my ovary and I found a lump in my breast that the doctors are still “watching”. 

In October, I gave away all my baby clothes, my maternity clothes, and baby stuff.

In November, I had a positive pregnancy test.

Yes, I cried, and so did some of people that know me.

Because I and they knew what was coming.

I was counting the cost.

I knew that there would be months of nausea, vomiting, and heart palpitations. There would be months of exhaustion and months of struggle and possibly another life threatening hemorrhage.

And to be honest, so far that is what is has been.

There have been very hard days.

But what I know is that bringing forth life, spiritual or physical, means a willingness to suffer.

And I am willing.

“For God called you to do good, even if it means suffering, just as Christ suffered for you.  He is your example, and you must follow in his steps.” 1 Peter 2:21

“So then, since Christ suffered physical pain, you must arm yourself with the same attitude he had, and be ready to suffer too.”  1 Peter 4:1

Jesus understood suffering.  Embracing suffering  doesn’t mean it isn’t hard, it doesn’t mean you don’t feel pain.  Jesus felt pain on the cross.  He knew in the garden of Gethsemane what was coming and he asked the Father for this cup of suffering to pass by him if there was any other way.  There wasn’t.

 And so Jesus accepted his suffering.  He accepted what was given to him and laid down his life so that many could live.  So that we who have chosen to follow Him could live forever with Him in heaven.

This is my constant hope, the same grace of God that saved me from sin, is still saving me now, is perfecting me through these struggles, is making me more like the One that I love.  The One who suffered for me, to bring me into His kingdom and into the life that will never end.

“And since we are his children, we are his heirs.  In fact, together with Christ we are heirs of God’s glory.  But if we are to share in his glory, we must also share in his suffering.  Yet what we suffer now is nothing compared to the glory he will reveal to us later.  For all creation is waiting eagerly for that future day when God will reveal who his children really are. … We long for our bodies to be released from sin and suffering.  We, too, wait with eager hope for the day when God will give us our full rights as his adopted children, including the new bodies he has promised us.  We were given this hope when we were saved. “  Romans 8:17-19 & 23-24

Hope that is built on Christ alone, on the future glory to be revealed in us who are His children, is really the only hope that will stand.

The hope of the gospel is truly the anchor for my soul.  The only thing worth living and dying for.

And like the Apostle Paul, to say that “My life is worth nothing to me unless I use it for finishing the work assigned to me by the Lord Jesus – the work of telling others the Good News about the wonderful grace of God.” Acts 20:24

So despite struggles, snowpocaplyse, or suffering, we have a hope that overcomes this world, and a joy that will never end.