Being Willing to Give Up – When we have to be an Abraham

Looking back on the early days of Michael’s diagnosis, one of the most difficult realities I had to face was the fact that my son’s life may be shorter than I expected or wanted it to be.  It was a painful and scary thought that shattered me to the core and contemplating on how this story may end was agonizing.  Normally, I am one who does not like to wait for surprises.  If I am going to watch a suspenseful movie, I will always want to know how the movie ends before I watch it.  It helps me get through the difficult parts of the story.  It does not matter if the situation is real or not, when someone is facing a critical struggle, I tend to have a very extreme visceral reaction. By knowing how the story ends, I am able to handle the stress of the situation I am watching knowing that the protagonist will be ok in the end.   And, if I do not like the ending, I would choose not to invest my time to watch the movie.  This, however, was one ending I did not want to know.  At least, not unless it would be the ending that I would write.

I remember that late evenings were the most difficult times of the day.  After everyone was asleep and the house was full but still felt so lonely, I would be left alone with my thoughts and my conversations with God.  Broken, scared and full of tears, I would literally fall to my knees and pray face to the floor.  It was the first time in my life I did this and the first time I realized what intimate prayer time with the Lord was like. I had always kept my conversations with God so casual for so many years. Suddenly I longed for what I had been missing out on for so long.    I would beg for Michael’s physical healing. I would plead with the Lord to do something that was amazing and miraculous.  I had already seen Him move miraculously so many times before in my life. If He would just heal Michael, it would just be one more story, an amazing story!  One more thing that God had done in my life…that I would not share with others. 

He was speaking to my heart.  I looked back on my life and all the ways that God had clearly come through for me.  So many times, I could have sung His praises but I just took the win and quietly moved on. I came to a point where I realized that I had not been who God created me to be.  He gave me experiences to share, stories to tell, seeds to plant.  I was lazy and neglectful to the opportunities He had given me and I was selfish with my time.  I allowed myself to get busy with life and it was picking up speed.  I did the bare minimum to serve the Lord and purposely drowned out the call to do more.  I wanted full control over my life and so I started to create my own story to tell.  This story included Michael and he was fully agreeable to play an active part in my effort. We became a team to seek out our own wills for our lives and find worth in achievements for ourselves rather than achievements for the Lord and our story, MY story, did not include my child dying from cancer.

Each night the thoughts swirled in my mind like a cyclone. Overwhelmed, one of those nights early on in our journey, I sheepishly asked God, “Lord, are you going to heal him or are you going to take him?” At first, I honestly feared the answer to that question and did not really want an answer unless it was “I’ll heal him”.  But then I felt the Lord put this question in my heart, “What if my will is not to heal him? What if I have something else for him? Will I still be your God?  Will you still praise Me?” Suddenly my mind was filled with images of the potential future.  The thought of losing Michael and the things he may endure were gut-wrenching and suffocating. Especially since I knew he did not have a relationship with Christ nor did he want one at that point.  It made my heart ache and I wanted to barter with God. I did not want to endure it and I did not want Michael to endure it.  Then, suddenly the Lord reminded me about His son and what he endured for us.  God knows what it is like to deal with this reality.  In fact, He willingly endured this type of pain.  He gave up his son and allowed him to suffer and die for me, for us!  Suddenly, it was like I was meeting Him for the first time all over again.  Tears of pain drenched my face as a cried out to God asking how He did it?  The experience of losing someone you love is agonizing!  The tears of pain, transitioned into tears of gratitude for His love and forgiveness that I do not deserve.

Finally, I got to a place that I had been fighting to stay out of for far too many years.  That was a place of complete and full submission. My heart still wanted Michael to be healed but my heart also wanted to accept whatever God had for us.  I threw up my hands and gave it all to him.  I was finally ready. I was ready to fight the fight. I was ready to weather the storm.  I was finally ready to fully trust in Him. Knowing that the thoughts the Lord has for us are thoughts of peace and not of evil, to give us a future and a hope, (Jerimiah29:11) I was ready and willing to do whatever it took to honor and glorify Him in the situation.   Getting to that point in my spiritual walk was both rattling and reassuring at the same time, a strange mixture of anticipation and excitement.  I knew it would not be an easy course but I also knew, in my heart, that He would bring us through.

Everyone will go through trials of deferent degrees and they are never fun.  I do not always understand why they happen, but I can say from experience that I do not need to understand I just need to trust in Him through the experience. I need to fall back on the truth that He is who he says He is, and wants to bless me, He wants to bless everyone. Even if in my mind,  I do not see how it can be good, I have learned to choose not to lean on my own understanding but just trust in the Lord with all my heart.  In fact, trying to understand the circumstance we have been given does nothing but distract us from truth and opens our hearts up to deception.  It was important that I keep reminding myself that this situation is one He has allowed and will all be for His glory and our good. I got to the point where I experienced the most difficult thing to say out loud. “Lord, if it’s your will, I am willing to lose him.”   This is still painful to say out loud.

The first night after we had received the diagnosis, I prayed for many things, one of the things I prayed for was to have the faith like Abraham.  That night when I was on my face before God, I contemplated with God about Abraham.  Abraham had not started out well. He was a man who allowed fear to drive him.  Fearful that kings would kill him over his beautiful wife, he would lie or tell half-truths.  God had already made a promise to him, but Abraham did not trust God enough to get him through difficult situations.  After years of seeing the Lord work in his life, he finally got to the point where he fully trusted the Lord.   God had made a promise to Abraham through his son Isaac, but then asked Abraham to take Isaac to Mt. Moriah to sacrifice him.  What a mind-blowing request!   Yet, knowing that God keeps his promises, Abraham fully trusted God and was willing to obey this seemingly crazy request and lose his son.  I do not know if Abraham felt God would stop him or resurrect Issacs or what other miracle He would do to keep his promise, but the point is, Abraham trusted God more than his circumstances.  He trusted that God is a good God who keeps his promises and through his obedience, God provided a substitute and Isaac was spared.  I see so much of myself in that story.  My walk with the Lord did not start well.  I still tried to have control over the situations in my life.  I may not have purposely lied to people to save my own skin but I lied to myself about the level of trust I had in my God and I was now at a crossroads. Here I stood at the foot of Mt. Moriah.  I could choose to march up the mountain with full trust or walk back to my camp and try to find ways to make an outcome that I wanted to see.  I am so glad I chose to walk up that mountain.  Thinking back on that story of Abraham and Isaac, I wondered about Isaac.  He was not a child in the situation. He was old enough to know better and realize that something was not right with that trip up the mountain.  But he went, willingly, not sure of what the end of that story may hold for him.  Michael and I would become a new team and we were both willing to live out the story already written for us; we were both willing to walk up that mountain in full trust.

My prayer for anyone reading this, is that you choose to put your full trust in the Lord and receive the blessings and freedom that comes with it.

Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding; in all your ways submit to him, and he will make your paths straight.  – Proverbs 3:5-6