Today was my birthday. Growing up I recall anxiously looking forward to my birthday and thinking about what I was going to get or what I was going to get to do with my friends or...It was all about ME. Even in more recent years, I can still recall times when it was my birthday and for some reason I thought that entitled me to a nap or just getting to take it easy in some way or another.
This year my reflection on my birthday is a little different. My birthday started early, around 5 AM when Reuben had a seizure and I was out of bed to help comfort him and get him resettled before climbing back into my own bed to try to get a little more sleep. Then sometime before 6 Reuben crawled in to our bed, as is often the case in the mornings, especially after he has been having seizures.
At 6:30 the alarm went off and it was time to get Krassi up. Get him changed, get him dressed, do his "brushing" routine, get his compression sock and braces on and get him fed, pack his lunch and get all of his winter gear on and loaded into his wheelchair in time to catch the bus.
By 7:20 he was on the bus and I came back into the house where Andrea had the monitor on Reuben as he has just had another large seizure and was wiped out on our bed. Shortly after that, he started moving around, so I went up to get him and bring him downstairs where we could keep a closer eye on him. He was pretty shaky, so I just sat with him on the chair in the dining room. Over the next 30 minutes or so, he cycled in and out of partial and tonic-clonic seizures and his little heart was racing and feeling like it would pop out of his chest. Andrea and I decided this run of seizures had been going long enough and it was time to give him his "rescue" med. After that the seizures slowed and stopped and he fell asleep in my arms.
It was while I was holding him during the seizures that I was thinking about how a birthday, or any day for that matter, that we are given is an opportunity to serve God by being obedient to what he has called us to do. For me, rather than being upset that Reuben was having seizures on MY birthday, I could thank God that I have been granted another day of life to love and care for Reuben and all those that I have been called to love and care for.
I am almost certain that those thoughts this morning have been flavored by the study of Hebrews that I just wrapped up leading this past Sunday at our church and the many nightly conversations that Andrea and I have been having as we wind down before going to bed. The whole book is about how Jesus is better than everything that came before him and how he is the only way that we can draw near to God. Then we have the whole "hall of fame of faith"in chapter 11 about all the examples that we are supposed to learn from and imitate how they lived by faith. How they saw the reality of God and believed that the promises he had given them were true and "by faith" they lived lives that proved that they believed God and were more concerned about obeying him than conforming to the patterns and logic of this world. (Who would be willing to sacrifice their only son, through whom the promise of descendants as numerous as the sand on the seashore, was supposed to be fulfilled? That makes no earthly sense whatsoever!!! Yet that is exactly was Abraham was doing because "by faith" he believed that God could raise Isaac from the dead.)
I warned my class that the term "hall of fame of faith" makes me a little nervous because it makes us have the tendency to put these people in a different class of people with "super faith" and that for the rest of us with just "regular faith" we shouldn't expect so much. On the contrary, I think the point of that chapter is to show us what faith looks like. If you have faith, there will be things about your life that can't be explained apart from Christ/God, your life shouldn't make sense to the outside observer.
Then in chapter 12, we have all those who have gone before us as a "cloud of witnesses" testifying that God is faithful and that we can finish the race just like they finished. Then the example of Christ who endured the cross for the joy set before him. That is a huge statement and it ties back to Hebrews 10:24. "For you showed sympathy to the prisoners and accepted joyfully the seizure of your property, knowing that you have for yourselves a better possession and a lasting one." They did these things because they believed that what they had to gain in heaven with God for eternity far outweighed the things they were giving up on this earth. If they and if I understand and believe that, it WILL change my life like it changed theirs.
So, getting back to the birthday topic. By loving and caring for those that God has called me to love and care for, I have certainly given up other things. Yet, I have not done that for the sake of being hard on myself or out of altruism. Rather, I think about it as a form of delayed gratification. God has ways that he wants us to live, things he wants us to do and those things will bring about difficulties in this world. As his children, he is disciplining us in this life (and as he says, that is not pleasant at the moment, but yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness for those who have been trained by it) so that we may share his holiness. And ultimately so that through his loving discipline of us, we can escape the judgement/punishment to come and rather have LIFE eternally with him!
It was a good birthday after all.
No comments:
Post a Comment