Stand Up in the Fire
This post originally appeared on Anneseley Writers Forum on February 28, 2018.
I watch her twirl, dancing and laughing without a care in the world, and I want to bottle up this little girl-ness forever. I’m mesmerized by her feistiness and drawn in by her liberty. Have I ever felt so carefree? Curves and confidence say that she is on the cusp of womanhood, and I know these glimpses of girlhood can’t really last forever. But I fiercely pray for her freedom to remain because it is for freedom that she has been set free. My mother-heart teeters along the threadlike line between chasing everyone and everything away to shelter her and setting her loose to soar. Somehow I know she was born for flight.
I discovered it in the dark of night, silhouetted against pink hospital curtains, where nurse and patient met again and again in a sacred hush. Rapid weight lost and insatiable thirst heralded a pancreas that had suddenly short-circuited, and her young life became unexpectedly marked by pricked fingers, rigid carbohydrate counting and innumerable injections into belly, hip and leg. Why did my sweet girl have to face this dreadful captivity? Out of nowhere, it was apparent that the spice of class birthday parties and the spontaneity of side-of-the-road ice cream stands were no longer going to be easy.
An undercurrent of disability had begun to flow beneath the ground of our family. This little one’s life was now literally held in a delicate dance of careful calculation of food, rest, activity, and insulin. Like a movie’s special effect hurdles perspectives towards something frightening, my mind raced forward into the ugly possibility of complications with eyesight, coma and amputated feet.
I cried out to God in anger and frustration, willing Him to take this affliction from her and to shackle it to me instead. What did a sweet ten-year-old girl do to deserve such a restrictive sentence? My soaked pillowcase and clenched fists seemed to be answered by silence, punctuated only occasionally by the squish of nurses’ soles up and down the hall and the moans of a youngster in an isolation room nearby.
But it was for freedom that my little girl had been set free. And it was in the dead of night, as she generously extended her hands over and over to the nurses to prick and draw blood, without wincing or complaint, that night air whispered to me of her liberty.
As she courageously took syringe in hand and learned how to insert it under her own skin, tried, failed, and tried again, I learned of her courage. Freedom was in her laugh as she teased me for getting lightheaded over the repeated sight of her blood and in her willingness to simply accept what she had been handed, her refusal to be defined by it, and her determination to simply adapt and continue to live. She would just do this thing. She would not yield to a spirit of fear.
So what of me? Could I trust God this willingly? Could a 15-year believer, and responsible mom and ministry leader truly hand over the life and health of her baby girl to the Lord? Midnight hours in the ward were dark nights of the soul as I wrestled a reality more ugly than I’d ever predicted.
I didn’t really trust God with my girl. I remembered bringing this little one into the world, pink and perfect. I flashed back to standing before a congregation and saying that she was His. I remembered praying again and again that she would be a young woman of dignity, and that she would walk with strength in the protection of the Lord.
These memories unraveled me, rumpled and angry on that cold cot by her bedside. What of them, God?! What of our prayers for our girl? Did you not listen? Are you not good enough to answer with love and strength and protection from the malice of disease? Pink and perfect memories were marred by the doubt that they were all lies. I had never felt so abandoned by my God as I did tangled in those hospital sheets, cot crammed between bed and locker.
In the days and weeks that followed, we began to learn the systems and severity of this cruel disorder. My thoughts became blacker with resentment that my sweet one was bound in this trap. I heard my own voice speak words I did not even believe to people who were concerned, words of trust in God’s control and protection.
On the outside I wore a mask of confident faith, but on the inside I teemed with anger and mistrust. I felt swallowed by hypocrisy. Bitterness seemed to mount even more as I heard her lovely voice singing of healing, all alone in her room. She trusted Him to heal her of this disability. How could He ignore this sweet one’s prayers?
The lyrics seemed to waft their way from her room to my heart in a moment:
I have come to take off every limit, And I need you to stand up in the fire… (Wonders: Dustin Smith & Bailey Rudoski)
To stand up in the fire meant that even though the fire was present, there was still strength to stand. To stand up in the fire meant that there was a choice whether or not to lean into that strength.
I had a choice in this, and so did my sweet girl. She had already made hers. She had chosen to trust-fall into arms that were sure and to live limitlessly despite a disorder that sought to limit her. Even with a disability, she was truly free.
I watch her twirl, dancing and laughing without a care in the world, and I want to bottle up this little girl-ness forever. Somehow I know she was born for flight.
Elizabeth Joy