Rescue

I’m four days out from surgery and still feeling quite sore. I didn’t expect things to feel quite like this. I really didn’t think I would be hurting this bad for this long. But, here I am, in the pre-dawn hours of a misty Sunday morning with a throbbing bottom and a love-hate relationship with the Sitz bath.

The funny thing about life is that it really doesn’t care what all you have going on, it keeps rolling along throwing other stuff at you all the while. Friday night I learned that my youngest son had crushed his cell phone accidentally by a cinder block. He was helping a group of friends who were building their “man cave” when it slipped out of his pocket at the precise moment he tossed the block. Of course, the block landed on his phone. I had never filed a claim on a broken phone but I’ve been paying money each month for probably the last ten years for device insurance. I probably could buy about ten new phones for the money I’ve put aside for device insurance. But, in times like this, I’m grateful to have it.

After haggling with the phone insurance people for a while, I finally got his new phone en route. They delivered it yesterday, which was much quicker than I expected. Even though the destruction of the phone was bad, help arrived. It got me to thinking about all the times in my life when things were bad but rescue came.

I was a freshman in college on a trip to Birmingham, Alabama with the Baptist Student Union when my ten year old SUV decided to die on the side of the highway during rush hour. Thankfully, this was in the early days of cell phones and I had recently upgraded my purple beeper for a Motorola hand held cell phone. At the time, it was the latest technology. The glowing green buttons on the phone made so much noise when I dialed a number, phone calls were never made in secret. I called my mama who reached out to some of our family who lived in the area. They came to my rescue and drove me safely to our hotel room. Everything had lined up for my rescue in the weeks leading up to the trip. I had just happened to be in Sam’s club one day when the cell phone company was there selling phones. I was working full time and going to school, sometimes leaving class late at night. It seemed like a good idea to have a phone in case of an emergency. It didn’t take much to talk me in to buying a phone. But thank God I did.

Real life has so many curve balls, so many moments of unexpectedness. Sometimes we don’t know how or if things will work out. Weeks, months, or even years later it may all become apparent. And the fretting about how it will ever work out seems silly.

It’s just hard to see it that way when you’re in the moment. Right now, my bottom hurts so bad I don’t know how it will ever heal. When I didn’t know how I would feel like cooking, friends from work showed up at my door with food in hand. When I felt like no one cared, flowers showed up at my door. All of these things are reminders that come what may, there will be a rescue. It may be momentary or it may not happen on this side of heaven, but it will happen. Things are lining up as I write this. Umbrellas to keep my life shielded from the rain of life. This I know to be true because I’ve seen it happen many times over.

For now, I’m living real life with the facts I see in front of me. I was not fully prepared to expect this level of pain. I was not fully prepared for the bouts of nausea and lightheadedness, or the way I would toss and turn. I didn’t expect to try to live on a liquid diet. While all of these things seem pretty rough, the rescue is that the body heals. This is temporary for a greater gain. If my body has been healed by this surgery, that’s my rescue. If the story doesn’t turn out in the way I hope, I stand firm in my faith that the rescue is in the works. And, oh what a story it will be.