A New Year’s Declaration
“Lord, give us a year of healing.” That was my preposterous prayer request to the King of Kings on January 1, 2016. In my single years I had made it a habit to sit with my journal open, Bible unfurled, and gel pen in hand to seek the Lord for things to do in my heart over the course of the next 365 days. It wasn’t an empty New Year’s Resolution that I would only exercise for 15 days and then quit. This was Holy Spirit searching and seeking to reveal just a glimpse of what He might have in store. I would glance back praising Him for what He had already done or begun and then squint forward.
I filled lines with bullet point prayer requests guiding my heart in a direction toward the Lord–away from past failures. I wanted to believe God for more. I prayed for more and recorded it on my hand–written tablet to memorialize the boldness. I felt like Moses when I exited my yearly trip to the tabernacle offering my soul. My face “shone” in the glory of having met with God intimately, but with a veil.
The veil was an opaque set of glasses–a reminder that none of my requests were promised. None of them made sense beyond the cycle of scheduled things like the seasons or holidays or current conditions in which my heart was planted. My list would be moronic to an outside observer, artwork that needed an interpreter. My affections were deep and intertwined like a tapestry God was designing that couldn’t be unraveled in a sequential pattern. But I asked boldly for God to break new ground in still life.
The mundane of motherhood, the noise of incomplete thoughts bouncing around my taxed “mom brain” made it hard to sit for this once–treasured ritual. Like the Jews, I planned ahead, set aside the time, packed all my belongings ready for my now widened hips to be planted in a coffee shop for an extended pilgrimage, but I could barely catch a glimpse of the Lord’s royal robes. I would record my list and observe the time–1 hour and 15 more minutes to go. Now what? With each child my New Year’s soul event grew shorter, yet fuller day by day with hands on sacrificial love as commonplace offerings.
One month before January 1st, 2016 our family was dismembered at the marrow. The Caboose–our final planned baby–was 5 months old, still suffering from reflux but sleeping through the night. A cocktail of crushed probiotic tablets twice a day and a few other homeopathic wasted efforts were concocted to make me feel like I was doing something to ease his discomfort. While the baby slept, I laid awake for 5 months.
I tried to push through, hoping my body would flip a switch once the baby no longer nursed in the middle of the night. My body never did. As twilight turned to dawn I watched the clock: 1:00am, 1:45am, 2:30am, 3:10am, 4:00am. Finally at 5:00am I decided to wake my husband 30 minutes before his alarm went off, waving my white flag and declaring I needed help. Shaking his heavy sleeping body awake was futile knowing he had no solutions, but I was tired of being alone. We’d been praying and looking for ways to address the insomnia as safely as we could and still nurse the baby but found no solutions. We prayed again. I waved my white flag of surrender to the Rescuer to come and rescue.
Later that day I found myself in the arms of a good friend, ashamed of my incoherent sentences and inability to get over this. She eased me of my shame, proclaiming gospel truths to my surrendered brokenness breathing life into my exhausted body. God had carved out this time right here, right now to seek His face for help together. He was beginning to pull together a plan from my dark twilight pleas of “DO SOMETHING GOD PLEASE!” I expected to see His royal jewels today. In pain, He supplied.
We were able to schedule an appointment that afternoon with a doctor of integrative medicine who would likely treat my symptoms as naturally as possible. In one day I gave up sugar, dairy, and soy. Gluten had already been eliminated 2 years prior. The doctor admitted his hands were tied since I was still nursing, but had one option available upon further inquiry. Because the baby was sleeping 10-plus hours a night, I was able to take one yellow pill that would metabolize in my body over night and clear my system in 6–7 hours leaving Caboose unaffected. We left exhausted but thankful I could get some sleep. There were more long days ahead and this yellow pill was a breadcrumb of manna for a short spell.
Our middle son-Squish–the “go with the flow,” I want to be like my big brother kid–showed every sign of readiness for potty training. Like crazy sleep deprived people, we took that on as we learned to cook from scratch, nursed the baby, treated reflux, and suffered in insomnia. He mastered it in three days. It was a gift from the Lord that said: “I see you. Trust me. Walk with me. I am with you.” More manna. I had lived like time was my creation for seasons. The aftermath of thinking I knew tomorrow became too much. The Lord forced me to depend on manna for that day alone. He ordained many hopeless days ahead. Had I known, I never would have made it through. In the valley of his cleaning basin he provided manna only for today.
The gorge continued to grow deeper when we received news that my parents would be unable to join us for Christmas as my father’s test results showed he had triple heart blockage. His doctor put him on the no fly list and scheduled surgery a week after New Year’s. The darkness revealed our whole family needed heart surgery from the best surgeon. I stuffed my face with the bread of His Presence.
And then there was our oldest son, “Super”: the spinning, red zone, no eye contact, mysterious genius child revolving like a top in our living room. His body gyrated out of control, unraveling my calm husband and expending the reserves our bodies no longer had. We got him an appointment with the integrative doctor I had seen in an attempt to reduce our family load. Measuring his vitals and blood pressure was a competitive wrestling match with loud yells and screams from the crowd and single competitor. The child-size cuff a vice to his arm squeezed red fear from his unresting heart. The elastic tourniquet for drawing blood was a noose of death, the needle like a dagger of death to his five year old veins. Three nurses counted to 100 with me as I restrained and distracted his brain from sucking out 5 vials of blood.
We discovered he had adult-level toxicity with a parasite swimming in his organs. Treatment was one compound prescription, a few supplements, and a complete diet overhaul. We started with the supplements one manna morsel at a time and the prescription. Out of the corner of our eyes we saw a flash of the Lord’s birthstone: eye contact for the first time in three years. The Lampstand.
God created the eye like a living camera designed to assemble and repair itself with each blink and lens focusing twitch. David Merton says, “you can examine part of someones brain just by looking them in the eye.” For years my son’s eyes were an 80's version of pinball in a flashy arcade. You’d gently hold his face steady paying your twenty-five cents to play and then try and get your eyes to match while he pressed the side buttons bouncing them from side to side setting off dings and bells and other auditory meltdown noises. The glass display would light up as the ball bounced everywhere until it finally dropped into the tunnel declaring game over. We played this game day after day trying to see into him. His eyes said something was wrong with his brain.
Matthew 6:22 says, “The eye is the lamp of the body, so if your eye is healthy your whole body will be full of light.” The light of Christ shined on him since the Lord saw his unformed substance in my womb. We were active in seeking non-invasive treatments experiencing small improvements but no victories. I was constant in prayer begging to enter the Holy Place of wisdom. While I waited we practiced therapies, studied, and fought for our son. One day we saw a glimpse of the Lord’s healing power.
I was sitting on the floor near my husband in his man chair. Super was spinning and trying to tell us something. He looked me straight in the eye as if he had always looked into my hazel eyes, stopped spinning and spoke. Once he finished, he went back to his five year old acute adventures, unaware of our physical interchange. I asked my husband if he saw that. He responded with one sentence and we were all in with his alternative treatment. Jesus had taken mud, spit and wiped Super’s eyes in it so he could see for an instant. We had gone through 1,576,800 minutes with out eye contact, unable to see into our son’s soul clearly. In one second of 1,576,800 waiting minutes, God said, “Give me glory and I will help you ALL to see.”
Christmas came and we celebrated new traditions without my parents. The day after was busy with cleanup and nutrition studies. Whole food cookbooks were purchased to be sous chefs with the master culinary artist and more eye contact was served. But by evening we found ourselves hiding in our laundry room as an F4 tornado ripped a path through our town 1/4 of a mile away from our house. We sang, “Holy Holy Holy is the Lord God Almighty” in the dark.
This year I didn’t need a tabernacle trip to the Holy One. I needed Emmanuel–God with us–all the time, everywhere. A New Year’s journal entry was trite considering our circumstances. Instead, I opened my mouth and asked Him for a year of healing. I didn’t know what His response would be over the next 365 unknown spoken days, but I was looking expecting to see His royal robes. Jesus was born to set His people free. With opaque glasses I asked Him to do what I knew He could, but might not do. The response took 365 God ordained faith-like days but Emmanuel did say through His word, “Now therefore stand still and see this great thing that the Lord will do before your eyes.” (1 Samuel 12:16)
