Puzzles

I question everything.  our neighbor’s everyday question was “what do you know for sure?”  As I told you earlier, my sole answer was “Jesus loves me, this I know”.  I don’t know it with my head like I know most of what I think I know.  I know it with my whole being and I question it with my head.

 My botanist father taught me to talk back to supposition.  In truth doubt may have been my bent from birth.  I’m not advocating for the position, it is just my reflex to question what I’m told is true.  What I know is that God is there, beyond my understanding.

 In the early nineties I developed a dull constant pain in my lower back.  I made old man noises doing normal movements and felt nauseous when I lifted my kids. Then the nausea went full time. 

 In addition to being a skeptic I am an idiot so I didn’t go to the doctor for quite a while.  When I did the diagnostics took another few weeks.  Then one Friday during an MRI I knew something was up because the techs pulled me out after 45 minutes only to inject me with dye and send me back down the tunnel.  I went home again without answers expecting to hear from someone the following week.  An hour later the doctor called and told me to meet him at his office.  “And I think you should bring your wife”, he said.

 Two possible explanations were offered for the area of spine that lit up like a beacon on the screen.  Neither gave comfort; bone infection or cancer.  My attention drifted and the screen blurred as all I could see was my daughter’s walking down the aisle without me.  Focusing again, I steeled myself for the fight. Ten days to till the exploratory to rethink everything.

 We went home to the girls and worked at keeping things normal till we knew more.  I even wanted to keep it quiet among friends and family because of the aforementioned idiocy.  We discussed the practical matters and faced our fears and hopes together. 

 The experience confirmed my priorities rather than changing them.  I hoped for the best and planned for the worst.  And I did more than my share of begging.  The questions I had were galvanized; the crux of my problem was a heartfelt knowledge that God was in control of the outcome.  I knew beyond doubt that he could be glorified in my death or my healing. 

 Somehow it became clear that he loves those I love more than I ever could. I was very clear with him about my opinion on the matter.  It was an odd combination of “do not go gentle into that good night”, and though he slay me I will serve him”.

Elaine, who is not an idiot, asked a number of people to pray.  On the night before the procedure 10 dear friends who knew exactly how to deal with me invaded our home.  They filed in and quietly surrounded my chair.  They laid hands on me and prayed.  Then they got out quick.  ‘That was uncomfortable’ I thought.  Then my breath caught and I noticed that the lump in my throat was not bile but emotion.  For the first time in months I was not nauseous.

 The following morning the agnostic orthopedic specialist took a core sample of vertebra.  Elaine says he had a bemused look when he met her in the waiting room to tell he that he found only inexplicably normal tissue.  A few weeks later he decided to take his wife and his doubts to church.

 Rival hypotheses for my condition and recovery still occur to me occasionally.   I want to rationalize and understand it but that does not keep me from absolute knowledge that it happened. 

 God is big enough to survive scrutiny.  I will grow by asking my questions and wrestling for the answers. Only a consummate idiot would decide his inability to understand God’s ways somehow diminished God.  When I get to the end of my understanding and the logic doesn’t reconcile I know it is due to the fact that I am using a finite brain to comprehend infinity.  He still gets to be God.

 I’m convinced that we know less than we think we do. The more we learn the more possibilities open. Between what God has divulged and what man has discovered I used to think we had much of the puzzle solved. 

 Now I am convinced that we just have the edge pieces of the jigsaw puzzle. But we don’t have them all, and some of them are probably not really edges. We certainly have only a few pixels of the picture on the front of the box. Now we know in part, but then we will know fully. The little we can see is enough to know that the completed picture will be vast, beautiful, and worth the struggle.

1 Corinthians 13:12

For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face; now I know in part, but then I will know fully just as I also have been fully known.