Fear: On top of the rollercoaster–where is the bottom?
All the news is bad news! Economic calamity driven by greed in the US, the flexed Russian military muscles in Georgia, Atomic arms agreements at the UN are at a standstill, a hopeless fatalism drives individuals both men and women to see no alternative but to offer their bodies as human bombs in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. It doesn’t take much nowadays to reflect and react in fear to the seemingly out of control world that we live in.
I remember well sitting on a bed at Children’s Hospital in Milwaukee, Wisconsin some 14 years ago and personally being buffeted by bad news. Sarah, our then 16 year old daughter was told that she would never be able to eat again. The social nurse arrived soon there after to say that our insurance company would not pay for her IV nourishment–it was food after all, not medicine. The IV’s cost $600.00 per day. The nurse suggested that I divorce my husband and move back to Wisconsin as the mother of four children, and then I could get governmental help.
Fear. Sarah and I sat in that room in silence, grasping for hope. We both reached for our Bibles and began to read out loud promises in Scripture: “The Lord is my Shepherd, I shall not want.” “Who can separate us from the love of Christ? …For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rlers, nor things present, nor things to come…will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.” On and on we read, one after another. The room seemed to be filled with a Holy hush, and nurses scurried in and out doing the necessary and leaving.
That night, I held the Bible under my pillow feeling the rock sturdy foundation under my feet. I did not know what the bottom of that rollercoaster ride would be like, but I knew that my faith, would be tested and put into practice and I would see with my own eyes how God would work. Very scary, but very comforting.
Now, all these years later, as I hug my healthy daughter and breathe a prayer of thankfulness for the faithfulness of a Father in heaven, I know that the world can threaten to steal from us all that we think that is important, but it cannot.
So when the world crumbles, my first thought is, the rock is under my feet. I have one more chance to put my faith theories into faith practice. That is very very good.
Sarah today is a nurse, however she and her husband Daryl are making plans to leave for Central Asia to invest their lives there.