Sunday, June 22, 2014

The thief in the night

Oh my.  This. Is. Killing. Us.  2 nights ago, Leah threw up in the middle of the night, had a fever and it has only continued.  Today we've seen a bit of progress in that she's holding down food and her fever has broken on it's own.  She's been super clingy and needy and that's ok.  But that kind of changes everything when these things happen.

I've been sick.  Some sort of strange bug hit me 2 nights ago.  It doesn't seem to be the same thing that she has though which has been good.  But I'm still not right.  So sleep hasn't been something that many of us have been getting lately, minus Noah who sleeps like a rock through just about everything.

One of the things we've discussed is that seemingly little things like getting sick or cutting a finger kind of put us out of commission.  If we were in a healthy place and felt like we could handle these things, it wouldn't be that big of a deal.  But that's not where we're at.  And so these things just take everything out of us.  Our capacity to handle things has diminished.

What does that mean for us?  Well, nothing has gone the way we expected it to.  Conversations happen that trigger things we never expected.  Small set backs take all of our emotional energy.  Traveling/moving steals any momentum we have.  Poor behavior in our kids steal any joy we seem to muster.
Surely I spoke of things I did not understand, things too wonderful for me to know.                 -Job 42:3
Satan is very real and alive.  We see it in our hearts, in our actions, even in our daughter as she goes through this sickness.  He has come to steal, kill and destroy.  He wants to rob us of life and joy.  What do we choose?  Well, some days we choose poorly.  Others we walk in the Spirit and move toward one another in grace.  Either way, we see him, we see what he's doing and we're not ok with it.

We cry out to God and sometimes it's in the midst of the crying that we receive hope.  Other times we receive silence.  We choose to believe that he sits on the throne and is sovereign over our hearts and lives.  We choose to believe that the things we don't understand or know will one day be made known. We choose to be faithful, even when it's difficult to get out of bed.  And we choose to rejoice in the hope that he knows and he understands.