How Much More

It's a wonder to me that any of us survive to adulthood.  When you consider the entire catalog of accidents, coincidences and sibling conspiracies, it starts to seem like Shakespeare understated the case by quite a bit in Hamlet's "To Be, or Not To Be" speech when he summed it as, "the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to."  Really, only a thousand?

The only things I remember from my own childhood had to do with me provoking a cat when I was 3 or so and driving my tricycle into a rose bush.  Well, now that I'm writing this, I remember crashing my bike and smashing my mouth on a street curb; my front tooth is still broken off at the bottom...and oh yeah, I had a couple of my baby teeth knocked out...and then there was the time...  You know, I think I'll stop now.  

I pinned all of our children to the emergency room table at one time or another.  Our oldest nearly died on a mountain in Wyoming.  He was run over by a log that was being dragged behind a truck .  For reasons to do with remoteness and terrain, it took us a couple hours to get him to the nearest doctor.  Turned out that in addition to the couple of broken bones we were pretty sure he had, he also had a major laceration. It had severed an artery near the back of his knee. That particular artery did not bleed until the doctor touched it with a pair of forceps.  At that point, in the doctor's office something like two and a half hours after the accident, it began pulsing blood.  I know that happened because I was there and saw the artery clearly as well as the blood. It is an image that remains very clear in my mind.

Our son begged me to just please not let the doctor give him a shot and stitch him.  The doctor offered to have one of his staff pin our son down so that he would not thrash while he was repairing the wound.  I declined.  I was not going to abandon the little one to his wounds and his fear.  I laid across him gently to hold him still, and told him quietly that he would be alright over and over.  It was very difficult not to cry at that point but to do so would not have been helpful.

When we finally got back to the cabin that night, my mother-in-law met me with a question.  She said, "Would you like ice in it?"  She was referring to the quite stiff drink she was going to pour me.  This was the moment in our relationship when she liberated herself from all mother-in-law jokes ever after as far as I was concerned. 

As traumatic as that day was, it wasn't the only such time.  There was another morning that probably served as training for the event above, when our other son managed to pull a chair over to a counter, climb up on the counter, find the children's vitamins (with iron) hidden at the back, open the child proof lid and consume the entire bottle minus 2 pills.  We presume he left the two pills there to throw us off track.  He probably wasn't aware of all the purply goo surrounding his mouth.

After some quality phone time with poison control, we hurried off to the emergency room. There it was determined that stomach pumping was required.  That was the first time I was offered a ticket out of the emergency room.  The nurse who was to perform the operation was visibly shaken at the prospect of having to perform the rather traumatic procedure on a 2.5 year old and assumed that I'd be even worse off.  I assured him that I would in fact be much worse off.  However, that would come later after we were done with what needed doing. 

I also laid gently across this boy, pinning his arms as gently as circumstances allowed to keep him from hurting himself still more.  I carried him out after the procedure and held him the rest of that morning while he slept.  I remember very much not wanting to put him down. 

Our daughter was not quite as rambunctious as her brothers.  Of course, she didn't have to be because she had them.  One of them, who shall remain unidentified here, introduced her to the concept of broken bones.  Another time though and all on her own, she managed to fall and open a cut nearly all the way down to her cheek bone, just below her eye.

By this time, we pretty much had our own express line at the local medical clinic, so we were taken in immediately.  It was determined that several stitches about 3/8 of an inch under her eye would be required.  I pinned this little bug as well.  The doctor knew all our family and he wasn't just shaken, he was actually shaking a bit himself.  I trusted him though as he'd stitched me up a bit a couple times...Of course one time, by the time he got around to the stitches the anesthetic had worn off.  He joked that he could give me another shot but that he'd have to charge me double.  I actually remember thinking that was pretty funny at the time.

This time though, he wasn't joking.  There were a couple slight complications with the procedure due to the proximity to the girl's eye.  That further upset the doctor and he steadied himself a couple times during the work.  (He was a good doc, heading a short list I have of lifetime favorites.)  Historically, our daughter has passed out at the sight of blood and/or mayhem.  This time however, she remained fully conscious and screamed at the top of her lungs for the entire event. While we did eventually finish, I think the girl quit crying about 3 days later. 

As a result of the slight scar (practically speaking, invisible now), we called her Franken Baby for quite awhile.

I started down this path after hearing someone quote one of Jesus' multiple statements of the form "...how much more does your heavenly father..."  You likely have a response to that phrase that calls up a particular verse and context.  If that's the case, consider looking again.  Jesus actually uses it multiple times, applying it to different contexts.  It seems that God and his love are much too big to be limited by a single "how much more." 

Of course, the broken reality of where we live invites us to believe that God's waiting outside with our family and friends, or maybe even that he didn't come at all.  On really really bad days, we might even think that he doesn't even know where we are.

The truth is though that he always knows, always cares and always loves.  And that makes the fact that he's always present the most important thing in our lives.  

He doesn't get us to the emergency room and then leave us.  He takes us there, stays with us, comforts us.  He even holds us gently in place while difficult and perhaps painful things necessary to cure and complete us are performed.  All the time, his voice whispers, "It's okay child.  It's going to fine."  He knows we're already saved but he also knows that we don't quite believe it.  That's okay too though because he's there to remind us and reassure us.  "It's okay child.  It really is going to be fine." 

Of course, we cry out "Please daddy, don't let him give me a shot.  Please dad, I'm just asking for this one thing."  But still he won't let go.  He won't leave us to our broken wounds or let us be crippled because of our fear.  And in the end, when he carries us out and everyone goes out to eat to celebrate it all being over, he holds us all through the meal so we never forget how real he his and how much he loves us.