Hard Morning

After a long day in the hospital on Tuesday, I enjoyed a relaxing morning with the girls before I headed downtown to see Wayne. I'm trying to keep things in their lives as "normal" as possible. During devotions this morning, we were reading in "God's Names" about the name Adonai (Lord). It was a beautiful devotional today and I especially loved this part, "Sometimes we don't feel like obeying God. Sometimes what He tells us to do is hard, or doesn't seem like a good idea to us. But we are not Adonai, the Lord. God is. He is always right and always good. He is El Elyon, the Most High who rules the whole world. He is Jehovah-El Emth, the Lord God of Truth, so He is never wrong." 

The part that says, "sometimes what He tells us to do is hard", this is how I have felt the past 24 hours. For the past few months, we have been praying fervently for God to use us and shape us into who HE desired us to be. We have been praying this prayer, "Lord, pour out your Holy Spirit upon this house that we may be a witness and light to this world. We want YOU to be glorified in everything that we say and do. We pour out of lives as living sacrifices to you. Use us as You want for Your glory." I have to be honest, I thought the work God was doing in our lives was to prepare us for missions. Never in a million years would I have expected God to bring this trial into our lives to bring Him glory. Despite that, I can see now God's hand guiding us along this journey of spiritual growth and preparing us for this season. That doesn't make it easy or less painful, but it does give us perspective. Just because it gets hard, we can't give up. We have to rely entirely on God to get us through this and continue to give Him the glory He deserves despite our circumstances. Isaiah 55:8-9 "For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, declares the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts." I may not understand God's plan, but I know that Wayne and I are resting in the fact that He has brought this our way and we will continue to praise Him and trust Him.

This was perfectly illustrated this morning. Wayne had a rough morning today. When I arrived, he told me that he had experienced two more seizures after I left last night (between 9:30-11:30pm). He told me that he was having constant tremors in his legs, which the doctors told him was a side-effect of having seizures. He just felt off and was feeling discouraged. Yesterday I had to face reality, today Wayne came face to face with some of his fears. He was feeling discouraged because when the neurologist gave him a "test", he couldn't remember the word hammock, his right arm was weaker then his left, and he struggled in saying the months of the year backwards. I later talked to the doctor and asked if these things are "normal" after a biopsy and they said yes. I wanted Wayne to hear that because he was thinking that he wouldn't recover from some of these things. Honestly, he does have some scary things to consider because of where the tumor is located. Although they are going to do their best, there is never a guarantee of anything. He is concerned that he won't be able to talk and use his right arm (the two things that give out in his seizures) after the surgery. There are so many questions and so many things that we don't know and won't know until next Thursday. Thankfully, we have a God who is omniscient and knows everything. He knows exactly what we will hear next week. He created Wayne and intimately cares for him. Matthew 10:30 "But even the hairs of your head are numbered." There is nothing that we need to fear because He says in Isaiah 41:13, "I am the Lord, your God, who takes hold of your right hand and says to you, Do not fear; I will help you."

By the afternoon, Wayne's spirits had picked up and he started feeling better. They put him on more seizure medicines and also gave him a dose of steroids to help any swelling in the brain to go down. Dr. Chandler came and checked on him this afternoon and decided to keep him one more night. They wanted to observe him and make sure that he was well enough to go home. This made me happy and relieved. Although I would love to have Wayne home tonight with us, I want to make sure that he is very stable before bringing him home. Later in the afternoon, they hooked him up to an EEG. They wanted to run some tests to see if he was having any seizures that weren't showing up physically. I told him that he looked like a male version of Medussa. One of his co-workers said he looked like he was from X-Men. 

I told him if he wanted rainbow braids and extensions, I would have paid someone to accessorize his hair without all this drama. We are trying to keep each other laughing and light-hearted when possible. If we don't, it will just feel overwhelming. We talked again tonight about how we prayed that God would use us and teach us about suffering. He is doing just that and we are relying upon His strength to get us through. He has allowed this for a reason, so we are trusting that He knows what He is doing and that He will accomplish exactly what He wants through this. We are fully surrendering to our Adonai, trusting His word, and relying on who He is.