LATE FALL
The phone call came late in the night.
On one end of the line, our anniversary trip (not far, but far enough) and on the other end, the oldest sister holding down the house and the boys and all the pieces. It was just for the night.
But what a night…
“Mom, he’s having chest pain. What do I do?”
Instant guilt. We never should have left. I take a deep breath and recall the words of the emergency room doctors and start to slowly explain what they told me about reproducible chest pain.
“If it hurts when you push on him, it’s more likely to be his bones and muscles, not the actual heart…”
We talk about the color of his skin, his lips, his toes. Over the phone, I teach her how to check.
There is so much we aren’t saying too.
“It will be okay,” I tell her. “Sleep now.”
“But Mom,” there is a moment of silence. “What if it gets worse and we sleep through it and don’t know…?”
I take another deep breath. There are so many unspoken fears in the question and it mirrors every fear I’ve ever felt since his diagnosis day. Because there are some things that time just doesn’t seem to dim.
What if it’s all beyond our control? What if he’s not okay and we just don’t know? What if I can’t stop something from happening?
I want to weep because I know the questions she might not even realize she’s asking.
What if this is the end of the story? What if we do it wrong?
It was a long night and Chase was stable in the morning. But the late night questions in the voice of the older sister still sit with me even now. “What if…?”
Walking with my children through suffering brings home time and again how very little we’re in control. How, particularly as they age in a house with unique special needs, there’s so very little we can do to protect them from the brokenness, and that, at the end of the day and the end of our rope, there is nothing left but to surrender.
How do we as parents teach a good surrender?
Not a surrender of hopeless defeat.
Never that.
But what if, like hundreds of souls throughout the Word and the world, it’s a surrender of hope-filled grace? What if there’s a way to show iron clad strength wrapped in the opening of tightly fisted hands?
It starts with acknowledging the Author, dear ones…
“Let it be with me just as you say.” [Luke 1]
“I believe… help me with my doubts!” [Mark 9]
The words of a pregnant teen, a father at his wit’s end for his son… the displaced, the weak, the broken… these are the voices of a good surrender. And why? Because there is a better story than the one we see in the moment and they knew it.
It takes strength to be open in the brokenness. And oh, we are broken, are we not? But we are also free and they saw it.
“If [Jesus] sets you free, you are free indeed.” [John 9]
WINTER
This story of Chase’s chest pain was not a one time piece. Darcy would (it’s always our precious girl, bless her tender heart) find him on the floor a few weeks later, clutching his chest.
He fights frequent dizzy spells and has now spent over a month in an event monitor – a monitor he was free of for exactly six hours before putting a holter back on [pictures]. There are clinical words like “orthostatic” and “bradycardia” and machines showing a number in the 40s next to the “BPM”.
There will be more tests, and he will almost assuredly be going back to cardiac rehab … and it’s time to talk to a rheumatology team too.
All the “what if” moments remain. And sometimes it’s really overwhelming to admit that we can’t protect Chase or his siblings the way our hearts cry out to protect them. And yet, I take their hands, and together, we surrender… not because this is good and not because we are defeated and done (though, wow, do we feel it some days) But because there’s a better story than the one we can see…and we know it.
And all of us? Well, we will just be quiet in the unfolding…
