Waiting on Help.
MATTHEW 27:42
42 “He saved others,” they said, “but he can’t save himself! He’s the king of Israel! Let him come down now from the cross, and we will believe in him.”
We are knee-deep in the season of Lent…that time of giving over our wants in order to experience the waiting, the little tugging of emptiness not filled, that is so necessary to turn the dial of our minds and bodies to God’s tune.
I spent the very first Lent season after Charlie was born in the NICU. That was also where I had my first Mother’s Day. Those were the delicate days, where it felt like Charlie’s existence rested on a pane of glass that had cracked down the middle. One wayward step would send us crashing through into a place so dark I could not let myself look.
I did not give up anything that year—not caffeine or chocolate or Netflix or phone time. I had given up my son into the hands of the God and the experts and that would have to be enough. I was in that place of waiting which makes you feel both untethered and also bent down by the weight of it all—a lead balloon.
I watched others do for him what I so desperately wanted to do as his mother, namely, mother him. They also did what he could not do for himself—they helped him breathe, sleep, wake, eat…live.
In July of 1949, C.S. Lewis writes a letter to his friend Arthur Greeves, in which he explains the pain of committing his brother to a hospital in Oxford for treatment for alcoholism:
“Don’t imagine I doubt for a moment that what God sends us must be sent in love and will all be for the best if we have grace to use it so. My mind doesn’t waver on this point; my feelings sometimes do. That’s why it does me good to hear what I believe repeated in your voice—it being the rule of the universe that others can do for us what we cannot do for ourselves and one can paddle every canoe except one’s own. That is why Christ’s suffering for us is not a mere theological dodge but the supreme case of the law that governs the whole world.”
This is what Lent and tragedy and all the hard things do: they cut us adrift and then force us to wait for rescue. And the waiting gives our feelings a chance to catch up with wisdom, which is over in the wings with all the force of the Gospel behind it.
Oh, how I want to paddle my own canoe. But God knew and knows better. He knew I would need to learn to let the hands and minds of others serve my family. He knew it would take those long months in the NICU to loosen, knuckle-by-knuckle, my grasp on my life.
This is why I wrote UNBOUND. It is entirely about offering up not only that paddle, but also the canoe…the river…and me.
What the chief priests, the teachers of the law and the elders of the land did not understand in Jesus’s ultimate sacrifice is the unequivocal need for helplessness. Jesus had to let all power and capability go so God could quite literally save the world. He had to mirror our vulnerability and dependence.
I cannot think of a worse feeling than helplessness. But I also cannot think of a more sanctifying one.
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A big thank you from Jamie on The Mom Gene!
