God is Helping Me

Thank you so much to each one of you that send kind emails, cards, prayers and even great food our way in this last week. Thanks to the friends who live close by who stopped by to talk and cry with me and showed themselves to be true friends.

During the past week, I have experienced a lot of struggles as I have worked through the loss of our baby. Although I never questioned why God allowed this to happen, I still had questions and things that I did not understand. Since last week, I had been getting very little sleep and my days were not much happier. I know it is normal to grieve over losses in our lives, but I was looking for some answers from God and wasn't hearing much from Him although I knew He was there.

Yesterday morning I was able to spend some time by myself in the quietness of the morning, so I began to talk to God about all the things that were bothering me and things I did not understand. As the Psalmist says, I "poured out my heart before God." When I finished, I decided to read one of the Psalms as I felt perhaps I could find some answers there. I took my Bible and opened it instead to a passage of Scripture that talks about the holiness of God.

As I began to read about the holiness of God and about how everything He does is always righteous, pure and holy, God began to touch my heart in a way that I can only best illustrate by relating what happened at the hospital just a few days ago.

I have always been a private person when it comes to displaying emotions in public--especially among strangers. However, after all the stress of having found out that our baby had died, I found myself crying in front of hospital staff, in the waiting room and in other public places where I normally would have been able to maintain my composure. The day before my surgery, I had to go for pre operation procedures so I was at the hospital for a while in various offices. I'm sure my face was a mess and I was having a hard time just going through with everything. I got to the lab at the end of my time there and by then I had been crying for a while.

The lab technician didn't say much but she looked at my already bruised arm and proceeded to jab it again and draw even more blood. When she was finished, though, she did something that no one had ever done even though I have had blood drawn many, many times.

As she finished, instead a sticking a little bandaid on it, she began to carefully wrap and bandage my arm, but as she did it, she not only bandaged it by carefully wrapping it, but she patted my arm and and squeezed it and communicated to me without saying a word that she didn't know my difficulty, but that she cared. In the quietness of that room, she took the time to care without saying a word.

Back to the passage about the holiness of God...
As I quietly thought on the holiness of God and about how God is different from the other "gods" we often hear about, I realized in a new way that God is a holy God and He does nothing out of spite, or revenge, or hatred, or just to take advantage of us. He does everything that He does out of His goodness, His righteousness, and His holiness. His holiness only allows Him to act righteously toward us, and this began to comfort my heart.

As I sat in the quietness of the morning and began to think about these things, God began to "bind up the brokenhearted" as the nurse in the lab bandaged up my arm. There wasn't a lot said between me and God, but I felt Him bandaging up my heart-- stopping to pat it and pour some "Balm of Gilead" in it and take His time to communicate that He cared. When He got finished, I was able to walk into the day having experienced a wonderful office call with the Great Physician.

Thanks again to all of you who have prayed for me and sent emails from all around the world. Between this blog and facebook, I have received a steady stream of thoughtful comments from those close to home as well as from thousands of miles away. I never knew there were so many people who cared!

Blessings on your day! God is always good.