The steadfast love of the LORD never ceases; His mercies never end. Lamentations 3-22
A while back I wrote as if it was a television series about the worst three-year period I’ve ever lived through. My dad died, my business partner stabbed me in the back (big knife), and my thirteen-month-old daughter suffered a horrific accident with a glass pitcher that took her right eye and changed everything about everything in our family life. The graphic details don’t need to be described, suffice to say it was a bloody mess. As Katie’s dad, I was lost to find anything good that could ever come from what happened to her. The failed surgery that couldn’t fix her eye, the doctor saying her eye needed to be removed and replaced with a prosthetic, the thin scar that ran from the edge of her right eyebrow down to the side of her nose, and the failure I felt for not doing job one which was protecting her from getting hurt. During Katie’s long recovery, I said to Heidi, my wife, “I don’t care how much happiness we ever have in our life, it will always be tempered by what happened to Katie.” The depression I felt was so deep. Heidi said I sat in the gold chair in the family room and looked out the window for a whole year. What was I looking for? Answers I would never get to every question a dad could ask when his baby daughter has been so egregiously harmed. Today, I still don’t know the purpose of it all. It’s just sad.
Something I do know is that God saw me. He saw Heidi. He saw Katie. And He saw Allison, Katie’s big sister by four years. He knew we needed Him and His love, compassion, and mercy. He knew we needed protection from further tragedy. You see, about a year and a half later when Allison was about seven, she asked if she could heat a bowl of buttered pasta in the microwave. Nothing major, it wasn’t uncommon. So Allison buttered her pasta, put the glass bowl in the microwave, turned it on, and when it dinged, she did what every person does when their food is ready. She opened the microwave door, leaned in, and BOOM!!! The glass bowl exploded in her face which was directly at the center of the microwave opening. Allison had inadvertently left a small, metal cocktail fork in the glass bowl, and the chemical reaction caused the glass bowl to explode. Heidi and I launched into fight or flight mode because of how loud the explosion was. There were shards of glass like shrapnel everywhere. The tiny shards were all over the kitchen, including on the counter opposite the microwave, behind where Allison stood frozen. Heidi had to put on footwear to carry Allison out of the kitchen. Dumbfounded, we looked at her face and each other, and said, “Allison, you just had a miracle.” Not one piece of glass touched her. Not a single shard had even grazed her. Her face should have been shredded and she should have been blinded by the glass shards that were violently channeled into her face. A physicist wouldn’t be able to explain why Allison’s face wasn’t decimated by the exploding glass bowl and metal fork. We just kept repeating how we couldn’t believe we had just lived a miracle.
God knew we couldn’t take another glass tragedy. He knew if the physics had played out, nobody in our family would have been able to ever do what He planned for us. He knew we had to have His mercy and protection. God put His holy and loving hand in front of Allison’s face, and sent the glass literally around her head. This God we sometimes doubt, get angry with, disrespect, ignore, and rebel against is a God who loves us and cares so much for us that He will stop bad things from happening when He knows we won’t make it. We can trust Him completely.
Numbers 6:24-26 sums up the gentleness of God’s love by saying to us, “The LORD bless you and keep you; the LORD make his face shine on you and be gracious to you; the LORD turn His face toward you and give you peace.”
God is just awesome!