My daughter’s room was entombed in an unnatural twilight. The only light leaked from the monitors hanging from the IV poles and the enormous screen bearing her weak vital signs. Enormous curtains draped the windows, which, instead of revealing the living city, opened to the hallway and the nurses’ station.
Fitting I suppose. Life is a very fragile thing in the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit—something to be tucked away and protected, outside the reach of the infection ravaging the limp body of the girl on the bed. This place was no place for a 12-year-old girl who 3 weeks before swam in one of the most elite meets in the state.
Moments before, a mass of medical humanity had swooped in moved my girl from a normal room to this place. They’d adjusted, measured, and then left my daughter and me alone in the belly of a beast. Safe for now. As I rubbed my daughter’s shoulders in a useless attempt to ease pain even the strongest narcotics couldn’t touch, I fought for some semblance of peace, of reality, and found my only solace in numbed shock.
Tubes snaked across the room threading into my daughter—one traveled down her nose into her stomach, another coiled long in her belly before draining out her side, the third and fourth pierced an arm and her hand respectively. She was too weak even to push a sheet off her body when her temperature soared.
I was so tired I could barely sit upright, let alone stand. After a year already full of tragedy and hospitals, hadn’t we already been through enough?
My girl’s head barely shifted. “Mama?”
I leaned close to hear her raspy voice and asked her what she needed.
“Why is God punishing me?”
I nearly choked. Why indeed?
Through my tears I answered back something along the lines of God isn’t punishing us and he promises he loves us. But deep in my heart I wondered if I was lying. If the God preached in our church actually existed.
After all how could this be love? How could it be love to allow a child to have two surgeries in one year? To be in this much pain? To be this close to…I couldn’t even allow myself to think it.
Throughout the 12 months before the hospital stay, my girl had been wracked in pain even as I dealt with my husband’s spinal surgery, my son’s pneumonia and struggles with asthma, and my own hysterectomy and autoimmune disorder diagnosis.
I have heard countless versions of, “It can’t get any worse.”
A trite answer that has nearly sent me sinking beneath the waves, a silent scream on my lips.
The truth is that the promise inherent in the comments make me hope for a soon-coming deliverance that has yet to arrive. This last year has left me drained of hope and questioning our concept of healing and God’s desires for our lives. Is there really a guaranteed end to our physical suffering? Does God promise to heal?
The dictionary defines healing as the process of becoming healthy again. Oh to be healthy. I yearn for the moment when my girl is healed, when life no longer threatens to pull us under. I long to be back in the boat with calm seas, for the journey to be done.
But I also know that life and healing is a process.
I know I’m incomplete not because I’m falling apart, but because I’m not finished yet. 
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I know that God is making my girl and I into something amazing. Something with a plan and purpose. But it doesn’t change the fact that it hurts, but it somehow gives me hope.
As I type this and watch my girl sleep, I’m praying for my faith to be strong enough to step out on the waters and trust God enough to help me stand. I have hope, not because I’m promised an end date, but because I have faith that I have hold of the hand of a God who won’t let me drown.
Beautiful and heartbreaking. I’m so sorry you guys have been through the deepest valleys this year. I love how you wrote that it doesn’t change the fact that it hurts. That is hard.
I think the church has done folks a disservice in not being honest about the nature of grief and troubles. Few of us has any idea of how to approach the difficulties of life and still hold on to faith. Probably the best books I’ve read on the topic are Silence by Shusako Endo and Grace Disguised by Jerry Sittser. I’m working on it.
This just makes my eyes teary. What severe trials you all have faced over the past eighteen months. I love you and your family, and pray for healing and comfort and every good thing for you all.
We’ll take those prayers.
Heartbreaking. My thoughts and prayers are with you. May He lead you in the way that’s everlasting
Thank you so much, Leigh. We appreciate your thoughts and prayers.
This is the rawest form of hope and faith – when there is nothing else. When in our human logic and understanding, we cannot rationalize our circumstance with the existence of a God or the existence of a God who is good.
When the pain is so raw, you come to realize that if God isn’t good, that if God doesn’t exist, then what is the point of existing, of being. And then you come full circle, with a glimpse of understanding – all that is left is to hope and trust and have faith. Because without it, what is the point of life itself.
And you should know. I’ve learned so much from you walking through your trials and troubles.
As Janyre’s mother and the mother of another daughter and two sons who have each experienced some very difficult life changing experiences, I often feel I am letting them down because I can’t protect or comfort them and make the situation better or go away like I as was able to do when they were little kiddies. I have found that no matter how old they are, when they are hurting physically and or emotionally, in my heart, they are transported back in time and are once again my little kids. And I fight back tears as I try to comfort and support them. I watch my children comfort their children and I am greatly touched and again fight back tears. I am so proud of them for their willingness to grapple with life’s difficult struggles, express their doubts about God – his existence, his love, and why does God allow these difficult situations to occur in their lives. And yet as Janyre and Suzanne have shared they have chosen to come full circle and to trust God with their lives. It doesn’t mean that they have smooth sailing. In fact, it seems just the opposite. It appears to me that the closer they walk with the Lord, the greater their struggles. And the greater their struggles, the more they wrestle with God and eventually surrender to him and ask him for his strength, wisdom, guidance and refuge etc. Just before my comment, my daughter, Suzanne wrote a raw but truthful comment which speaks to this very issue. When I find myself struggling with difficult issues review in my mind the passage, Romans 5:2b-5 “And we rejoice in the hope of the glory of God. Not only so, but we also rejoice in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope. And hope does not disappoint us, because God has poured out his love into our hearts by the Holy Spirit, whom he has given us.” And I Peter 1:6-7 “In this you greatly rejoice, though now for a little while you may have had to suffer grief in all kinds of trials. These have come so that your faith – of greater worth than gold, which perishes even though refined by fire – maybe proved genuine and may result in praise, glory and honor when Jesus Christ is revealed.”
Thanks for the encouragement, mom 🙂 Sometimes it’s hard to see the other side, to hold on to hope when it seems like there’s no end in sight.
I’ve been in your shoes. It stinks. All you can do is pray, then pray some more. Most importantly, though, is to survive. This Bible verse ran on a continuous loop in my head: “Be still and know that I am God.” (Psalm 46:10). It helped me find peace in dreadful times. I’ll be praying for your family.