Not Too Short To Save

“Surely the arm of the Lord is not too short to save nor his ear too dull to hear.” Isaiah 59:1

The year 2021 marks seven years that Hugh has lived with Type 1 Diabetes. 

As I sit here and type this, in the dark hours of the early morning, I have already stopped once to wake Hugh up and make him drink a juice box. I look at his sleeping face, his soft snores still like a child’s, but his long arms and limbs telling me he won’t be a child much longer –  and I feel myself falling. Falling back into the pit of fear that holds me hostage so often. How can I take care of him as he grows older? What’s going to happen when he becomes a teenager? How will he ever go to college and care for himself? What if something happens to him? 

The pit is deep and scary, but I know it well. Sometimes I feel like I’ve been living in that pit for seven years. 

Seven years of living with fear. 

Seven years of watching my son live a life he did not choose. 

Seven years of my asking, begging, pleading with God to give it to me – let me take the burden of Type 1 Diabetes and allow my child to go free. 

Seven years of reaching up, clawing my way out of a pit to a God who seems just beyond my fingertips – a God who can’t save me because my pit is too deep. 

“Save my son, Lord” I cry out in desperation – on nights when it’s dark and lonely. Nights when Hugh’s blood sugar drops dangerously low and my heart stops beating for a few minutes. 

“Save him,” I demand as I sit on the end of his bed, pricking his fingers over and over until I see the numbers on the meter slowly start to rise. 

“Save me,” I beg as I slip under the covers next to Hugh, his dreamy sigh letting me know his body has relaxed. He can return to a peaceful sleep while I stay awake and watch his numbers for a little longer. 

But it seems like God is just out of reach – I can see Him from the depth of my despair and I am stretching up to Him, but His hands can’t quite touch mine. I stand on my tiptoes, I jump, I climb. I clench my teeth and square my jaw – my sheer determination and despair for my son keep me reaching. I can’t stay in the pit. 

I call out to Him, over and over. “I’m here, God! Help me! Save me from my fear and my anger. Save me from the bitterness that creeps into my heart. Save me because I am so mad that my son, out of all the sons, has to have this forced upon him. He doesn’t deserve this. Save me, Lord!”

I can see God’s arms – he’s reaching down to me. But I am too far away. Too far in the fear and the anger. He can’t save me.

His arms can’t reach me. 

But then I catch a glimpse of something else –  I see other arms. They are attaching themselves to the arm of God and they are forming a chain of arms intertwining, tangling, stretching all the way down into the pit – all the way down to me.  

“I’ve been praying for you and Hugh,” she tells me as we stand in a fast food line both ordering Kids Meals for our little ones. I haven’t seen her in years, but she had heard about Hugh’s recent diagnosis. “How is he doing?” she asks. “I know it must be so hard. I’ll keep praying for you.” I look away quickly so she won’t see the tears stinging my eyes. How did she know that I could not pray? How did she know that I so desperately needed to hear those words that day? 

“Here’s my cell number,” she hands me a slip of paper. “You call me anytime. I remember when my daughter was first diagnosed. It was really hard – so I’m here to help.” And I call, over and over, simply to hear those words of hope that I cannot manage to find myself. 

“I want you to know I will do everything in my power to keep Hugh safe at school. He’s going to have a great year,” she writes in an email – her words a salve to my anxious soul. Her dedication and commitment lighting a tiny flame that Hugh will be able to go to school and be ok. 

The arms keep coming – an offer of a night off, a hug, a coffee date, a card in the mail, a friendship formed. And soon the arms are with me – in my pit of fear. And they are grabbing me and holding me tight, lifting me up to the sunlight. And finally, finally I feel myself being wrapped in the arms of God. The arms that are never too short to save. 

Not when they are intertwined with our arms and our hands and our feet. 

I leave the pit behind me, choosing to walk into the arms of the One who has been reaching for me all along. I know this morning won’t be the last time I fall into the pit. Sometimes it sneaks up on me, sometimes I choose to jump in – feet first and with all the anger and righteousness a mother can have. 

Sometimes the pit of fear is easier than reaching for the arms. 

If I have learned anything in these seven years, though, it’s this – The pit will always be there. The pit of fear or anger or selfishness or bitterness – the pit of unfairness or jealousy or rage. We all have one. And we may be in it quite often. But as long as the pit is there, so are the arms. 

Dear Friends, – if you are in your pit, all you have to do is look up. And, friends, if you are out of your pit, attach yourself to the arms of God and reach down.

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The Man in the White Coat

Sometimes I picture him as an older man. He has a grey beard and silver hair and wrinkles around the corner of his eyes. Sometimes I picture him as a young man. He is just starting out his career and is learning the hard ropes of being a doctor. At times his skin is light, other times it is a beautiful mix of brown and gold. Sometimes, in my mind, he has a stethoscope slung carelessly around his neck because he had seen so many patients that day and we were his last ones before his long shift ended. Other times he is dressed crisp and neatly, with pressed pants and a starched shirt. He is ready for whatever might come his way as he is just starting his rounds at the hospital. 

Honestly, I can’t remember what he looks like. I’ve tried over the years – I’ve tried to conjure up the image of that doctor who saved me that night in the ER. I can’t ever really picture him, so I like to make him look all different kinds of ways. I wish I could remember. I wish I knew his name. 

But the only thing I can really say for sure is that he was wearing a white coat. 

The man in the white coat is the one who lifted me up on that awful, miserable day. He rescued me from a tomb of fear, anger, despair, and utter destruction. He set me on the path that would lead to hope and love and faith in humankind. 

And I can’t even remember what he looked like. 

I guess it doesn’t matter, really. Because the fact is what he looked like was the last thing I was concerned about in that moment. I didn’t care who he had voted for in the last election. I didn’t care if he was conservative or liberal. I didn’t care about his beliefs or his convictions. His lifestyle, his charities, his political views . . . nothing mattered except one thing. 

He was kind. 

Scott and I were scared in ways we didn’t know was possible as we brought our young, frail, and very sick child into the man in the white coat’s emergency room. He was the rotating doctor in charge on the wing that evening. He could have easily dismissed us as one more patient he had to deal with. He could have rushed in and out with an attitude of busyness. He could have simply looked at the diagnosis of Type 1 Diabetes, thought to himself “Here we go again”, and gone through the steps of treating a sick boy. 

The man in the white coat did none of those things. 

Instead, he came into our small patient room. He saw two parents who were stricken with grief over their child. He saw the look in our eyes of panic. He saw a mother who was drowning. 

So the man in the white coat stops. He smiles. He puts the chart down and leans against the wall, casually crossing one ankle over the other. “Where are you from?” he asks softly. 

“Quite a drive in a rainstorm like this.” 

“I’m sorry to hear about your son’s diagnosis.”

And then the words that would start turning everything around – 

“I want you to know we’re going to do this right. Your little boy is going to have to endure a lifetime of shots and hospital visits from now on. We want to make sure that he starts off well.”

The man in the white coat carefully explains to us what they will do that night. No holding Hugh down kicking and screaming to get an IV in. “We’ll take our time,” he says. “We will bring in a specialist in helping children through this process.” 

He tells us that they will be careful with Hugh. That they want this to be a positive experience for him and that the hospital doesn’t need to be a scary place. He assures us that everything the nurses and doctors do will be to the end goal of getting Hugh healthy and safe. “Your son will be ok,” the man in the white coat says. “We will make sure of it.” And he did. 

I think about him at least once a week. 

Sometimes I close my eyes and think of him as I’m sitting on the floor of a family’s home. The mother is telling me she doesn’t have any money. The dad has gone to jail. Drug use is obvious and normal in their life. What would the man in the white coat do?

He would show kindness. He wouldn’t lecture or criticize. He would listen. He would do it right. 

Or I picture him when I become overwhelmed. When Type 1 Diabetes seems to be winning. When I just don’t want to do it anymore. 

The man in the white coat told us we would be ok. 

There are even times I picture him when the world seems dark and angry. When I start to wonder if any human being alive can be kind, I close my eyes and standing there is the man in the white coat. He was kind. 

I’ve probably created an image over the years in my mind of who the man in the white coat is. I’m probably mixing in a little of my imagination with a little bit of Jesus and a dash of who I hope to be. But man – if we could all just strive to be that kind of person. The person who helps instead of hurts. The person who listens instead of argues. The person who sees someone drowning and reaches down a hand – no questions asked. 

Because the truth is, the man in the white coat COULD be all of us. If we stopped asking whose side are you on, if we quit hurrying around, if we put kindness before accusations. 

In fact, I bet there’s a white coat hanging around your house somewhere and you’ve just forgotten about it. Go ahead – Reach way back into your closet and find your old and tattered white coat (or pink or navy or glittery or whatever floats your boat). Slip into it – doesn’t it feel good to put it on, kind of like you should have been wearing it all along? Doesn’t it fit you like a glove? Don’t you feel like yourself now that you’re wearing it again?

Now go admire yourself in the mirror. Do a few turns and check yourself out. Wow, that white coat looks good on you. 

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The FFF (Formula for Failure)

I was what some people would say, one of those lucky kids in school. I enjoyed reading and taking tests. I liked learning new things and tackling a problem. And I usually could figure out what needed to be done to get a good grade, do it, and then pass the test. School came fairly easy to me.

I liked getting good grades. I was proud of them. I wasn’t very good at sports and was fairly shy when I was younger, but I soon realized I could get attention and praise for my academic achievements. The teachers liked my grades, my parents liked my grades, I could get a shiny trophy at the end of the school year for my grades – it wasn’t long before I equated good grades with success. 

As I got older, I started to think of my classes as something similar to an algebraic equation. What formula did I need to use to get a good grade? It went something like this:

 X + Y = A+100 Success!!! 

How could I perform in this class? What teacher liked for me to ask a lot of questions? What teacher wanted a quiet student who never bothered him? Who wanted me to write long, detailed essays to get an A and who preferred brief, precise essays? I could always figure it out. 

College became even more of a challenge to prove my success. But I loved it. I loved the fact that I had the secret formula to winning . X + Y= A+ 100 Success!!! Every. Single. Time. (Hi Enneagram 3s – Yes, I’m one of you.)

When I graduated from college and started my teaching career, I was still working that formula. In my mind, my principal and supervisors took on the role of my teachers. What did I need to do to get a good grade from them? Simple – pass my observations with flying colors. Show growth in my students. Figure out what equaled an A+ 100 Success!!! and get to work to achieve it. Wow, I was good at this. 

Then I had a son. A beautiful, perfect baby that I adored more than anything else in the world. He was a gift from the day he was born. 

So, of course, I put my formula to work on him:

X + Y = happy, healthy baby (Which still equated to an A+ 100 Success!!! in my mind). 

This is a little embarrassing for me to admit, but I would take the baby book What To Expect The First Year and cheerfully check off my son’s accomplishments each month. I’m not talking about just reading the list and mentally checking things off – I’m talking about taking a pencil to the developmental lists in the book and literally marking each developmental stage off the list. Crawling by 9 months? Check. Saying at least 5 words by 12 months? Check. Eating a variety of foods by 15 months? Check. 

Good Mom + Total Devotion + Sacrifice + Doing Everything Right = Happy, Healthy Baby/A+ 100 Success!!!!

And don’t even get me started about our well check-up visits to the pediatrician. That was my report card. The pediatrician was my teacher and he was giving me the good grades. “He looks great” or “He’s very healthy”, or for bonus points – “He’s thriving” made me feel like I had the formula figured out again. I was getting an A+ 100 Success!!! in motherhood. 

Until one day . . . that awful day when our pediatrician told me our son had Type 1 Diabetes and he was very sick. 

That day a big, red F was scrawled across my life. 

For the first time, I had failed to get the good grade. And what was even worse was that because of my failure, my bad grade, my son would be suffering. He would bear the burden of my F – for the rest of his life.  

My formula had not worked. I was a failure. And it took me a long, long time to recover from it. 

If you have never felt like a failure, if you have never had a red F marked on a page in your life, then bless your heart, you probably haven’t lived to see 40 yet. Failure in life will happen, but here’s what I learned through my first F: We ALL have had failures. Some may have stemmed from our own bad decisions, some may have come out of nowhere. Some may happen in school, in our marriages, in our careers, in our family. And it hurts. Especially when we have a formula that we thought would prevent or protect us from those failures. 

The beautiful part of my failure, though, was that over time I quit judging myself so harshly and criticized others even less. It’s hard to remark on someone else’s scarlet letter when you have one of your own pinned to your chest. 

So slowly, over lots of tears and pleas for help and the silent treatment I gave God, I began to understand that I had been using the wrong formula my whole life. There was no X + Y = A+ 100 Success!!! 

There was only one formula to use and Jesus had given it to us thousands of years ago:

Love God + Love Others = Love

It’s a backwards sort of equation that makes no sense at first. It shows us how to give and not get. It demands that we be last and not first. It stands us on our head sometimes, then pushes and pulls us, and leaves us with more questions than answers. And it’s the only formula that will ever lead us to true success, which really doesn’t look like success at all. It just looks like love. 

I should have followed it years ago . . . 

I wish I could tell you that I have learned my lesson and I don’t strive for those As in life anymore, but I still struggle with it. I fight the urge to compare, to judge others, to work my old formula to achieve success. But now I know that there is no pass and fail in life. There is only one formula, dear friends, and that is love.  

And we all can get an A in that.

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