Good or Better, Settle or Surrender

At physical therapy last week, Littles’ PT handed us the paperwork we needed for his doctor and told us, “So if Wednesday goes the way we think, this is your last time here.”

I’m not exaggerating when I say that my heart felt like it stopped in my chest. PT has been my home away from home these last six months. We’re at PT more often than we’re at co-op, more often than we’re at piano lessons (or guitar lessons), almost more than we’re at church. Two mornings every week for a solid hour were dedicated to getting Littles back to the soccer field (and basketball court and football field, etc.). Two mornings every week, Twinkle tagged along to play with our PT’s long haired show chihuahuas. And two mornings every week, we made friends with everyone in the office.

And suddenly, it was over. Wednesday, ortho signed off on Littles going back to playing competitive sports.

There was a chance they wouldn’t. On the drive there (thirty minutes of just me and my teenager), we talked about what it would look like if he didn’t get cleared to play. I shared with him an Adam S. McHugh quote I’ve been mulling over—“We tell God what to give rather than asking what God wants to give.”—and told him that I’d been trying to pray over him with looser hands. Still I knew that if God and the doctor said no to this season of soccer, Littles would’ve been gutted. What would be a small delay to an adult would be a very big deal to my teenager.

But one of the things God has been trying to teach me this year is that when I get so fixated on something good that I think He should give me, I forget that He may have something better for me that I don’t yet understand. Something better that I might possibly never understand.

In August, God said no to Littles finishing his football season without injury. Instead, He allowed a torn ACL with an extra fun bit of meniscal damage and a broken bone. He gave Littles another round of surgery, weeks of excruciating pain, and months of PT. He gave Littles a seat on the side line while his siblings got to do all the things that he most loved to do while he had to just sit and watch. He gave Littles the death of hopes and plans and dreams.

It would be easy, at the end of this journey (give or take six more months of doing sports in a brace), to think that we’ve reached the goal: a return to normalcy, getting back to life as we know it. But this is not the reality.

We cannot go back to where we were before. Rather, we go forward with the gifts God deemed best for Littles and our family. Instead of what we thought was good, we got what God thought was better:

-Monday and Thursday quality time with my teenager

-Friendships with our PT and her team

-A lot of laughter with her adorable dogs

-The chance to ask for help and grace repeatedly

-An opportunity for Littles to assistant coach basketball for Twinkle’s team, since he couldn’t be out there playing personally

-Relationships built at co-op due to the shared experience of teenagers recovering from ACL injuries

-Lots of conversations with Littles about how to manage pain and disappointment and loss and jealousy

-Sports games where I now have to spend a lot more time praying because I’m newly anxious about who is going to send us to the ER next

And probably many other ripple effects that I don’t even know to count. These were the things God counted as better, when our family would’ve been all too happy to settle for merely good.

Many years ago, I read a book called Freefall to Fly by Rebekah Lyons. In it, she asks the question, “Why is there rescue and there is not?” Why are some cancer patients healed while others die? Why are some depressives given relief while others struggle their whole lives? Why are some disasters averted while others leave utter devastation?

Why is there rescue and there is not?

That question has become a key part of my narrative in the last dozen years. Sometimes there is rescue. Often, I struggle with the not.

This year, I’m training myself to answer the question in a new way. Why is there rescue and there is not? Because God somehow has something better for me than I can possibly imagine.

It seems impossible. How can better come out of an inoperable brain tumor? How can better come out of a broken marriage? Out of sexual assault? Out of miscarriage? Or genocide? Or racism? Or bullying? The list goes on. Things that are horrible. Things that God hates. Things that only exist because we live in a broken world and we’re waiting for Christ to come back and bring wholeness. How can better come out of these horrors? I don’t know. And I don’t understand.

But I want the hope that God is seeing something that I’m not. I want the hope that He’s not going to waste our pain. I want the hope that He’s still working and He hasn’t abandoned us. I want it with a desperation that some may not understand.

And so I pray: train my eyes to imagine more. And I believe: hope does not disappoint.

We see what we’re looking for, and I choose to believe that one day I will see how God is giving me better when I would’ve been satisfied with just good.

I would be happy with life, just plain old normal life (pleaseandthankyou), but instead, after these deaths, He gives us resurrection.

It seems impossible. It seems foolish. It even sometimes seems offensive. We don’t want death. We don’t want loss. We don’t want to live with this grief forever reshaping the way our souls walk in this world.

But the longer I live, the more I think that this reframing is the only way I don’t give in to despair. In the words of rough, uncultured, bumbling Peter: where else can we go, Lord? You have the words of life.

Real life, not normal life: resurrection.

{Meditation following a discipleship class on Paul Miller’s A Praying Church}