A glass darkly

The righteous cry, and the LORD hears them and delivers them from all their troubles. Psalm 34.17

My youngest daughter began vomiting Monday morning around 8 o'clock. At 8pm, she was still vomiting, unable to keep anything down. We debated between taking her to the ER and trying to ride out the night, hoping it would stop. We prayed and opted to wait and see if things got better. We went to bed and nothing stopped; in fact, it seemed to grow worse. Probably twice an hour, every hour, my four year old little girl would begin to cough up hell itself, we'd sit her up, and her body would heave in painful contractions until the episode would fade. We had been praying for her all day long and had amped up our efforts when night fell. "God, please see us. See Abbey. Make the vomiting stop, LORD. She cannot take much more of this; if not already, she'll be severely dehydrated soon. God, give it to me, pass it over to my stomach and my throat and my lungs. She is so small. We are crying out to you, O God. Deliver her from this..." We prayed this and more at least twice an hour, every hour, all night long. And nothing changed. No deliverance, no nothing. We took her to the hospital the next morning and sure enough, she was severely dehydrated and required an overnight stay and several bags of IV fluid. I must confess that I was really not on speaking terms with God that morning. The righteous cried and prayed and prayed and cried and... a singular petition and nothing happened - no earthquake, whirlwind or even a whisper from a still, small voice. No clouds by day or fire by night. No baskets left over. Nothing. There was no deliverance from trouble; just more trouble.

I relieved my wife around one o'clock the next day. I sat in what a hospital calls a "chair" and read while Abbey slept and a clear tube refilled her tanks. I was reading Buechner talk about listening to your life and how if you want to hear God speaking, you should listen to your life and what's going on and what you're feeling or thinking or doing. I said, "O.k. Fine. Here we go." I listened to the life I had lived the past 48 hours. I listened and watched while the tears of a mother ran down her cheeks like fast rain. I listened and heard the silence of my youngest daughter, who normally has no use for the discipline of silence. I listened and felt the one eye open/one eye shut mode of sleeping that we had participated in all night long. I listened and saw a brother and sister hold back their sister's long, auburn hair so it wouldn't get in "it."

"Well, maybe you weren't praying hard enough?" - That's bullshit. We knocked, knocked, knocked on heaven's door.
"Well, is there any unconfessed sin in your life; stuff that might clog up the communication lines?" What, so God won't move unless the line is clear? If that were the prerequisite, nothing would ever happen.
"Well, maybe it was a faith test...you know, God won't put more on you than you can handle." It sure didn't look like Abbey was able to handle it; in fact, it seemed to handle her. And am I to believe that God would allow pain to accompany her in order to teach me some lesson?
"Could it be a lack of faith?" On whose part? Abbey's? Mine? So if I wasn't such a faithless mouse, my little girl wouldn't have had to suffer?
"Well, I'm sure someone, somewhere was suffering more." You know, I think that's one of the most worthless collection of nouns and verbs in our current lingo. You can only play the people-are-starving-in-China, so-eat-your-beans card so many times; eventually the bluff gets called. When my daughter was vomiting her head off the other night, I never once thought - hmmn, at least this is not the Holocaust or 9/11 or...
"It must've been God's will..." Please, don't get me started.

Why do bad vomiting episodes happen to good little four year olds? I don't know. I'm open to the response the disciples got when they asked Jesus why a man was born blind: "so that the glory of God might be revealed." But if I recall the story correctly, the blind man received his sight. He was delivered. Me, I'm still blind, not knowing what in the hell went on those few days. We asked for bread and felt like we got stones and serpents. Some weeks don't make a lick of sense.