It’s been 34 days since I wrote these next words, and as I tape a new heart monitor to Chase’s chest, I find that I very much need the reminder. Do you?
“There are ever so many life things that don’t and won’t leave us completely until we see God’s face. It isn’t abandonment. It isn’t carelessness or forgetfulness or because he doesn’t love us. It’s because he’s doing something in our pain that we can’t see yet. I believe this with my whole heart. And real talk… it still hurts, doesn’t it? But in compassion, he sits with us in our pain. The antidote isn’t erasure of the pain (though with my whole heart and soul, I wish it was)… it is presence. God with us.”
Moment by moment.
[Chase has continued to lose weight and weaken over the holiday season – he is very much where he was at this same point last year before he started cardiac rehab. Those who know autonomic disregulation of the body can confirm that this is more or less “par for the course” and there’s very little that can be done. But in classic Chase fashion, he’s gone off on his own little medical side quest with ongoing rounds of chest pain, thereby scoring himself a fancy heart monitor for 30 days – and adding more tests and appointments to the cold, wintery days. Even in the worst of it though, there are still and always good moments and for those, we are extra thankful right now.]
