Life Lessons
On Sunday morning June 10th I woke up about my normal time but found myself with excruciating pain in my lower back. And when I went to get out of bed found I could barely walk. Over the next week, I would do some doctoring trying to figure out what was going on with my back. Despite the intensity of the pain and the severe impact on my mobility I never thought there was anything seriously wrong with me. Because there hadn’t been a recognizable catalytic event I assumed that I had simply pinched a nerve somehow and that over time it would correct itself. Or at worst I might need a cortisone shot and some physical therapy. However, on the advice of the medical community and at the urging of my wife Barb I finally went the ER at Methodist Hospital on Friday morning June 15 thinking they would give me a shot and I would be on my way home. After a short examination by the ER doctor, a neurologist and a neurosurgeon it was announced that I was admitted to the hospital. I actually had a serious case of spinal stenosis that would require emergency surgery to take the pressure off the nerves going to my lower extremities. Without the surgery I would never be free of the pain and most likely would never walk again. To say I was surprised would be an understatement.
On Monday afternoon June 18th I had a successful L3-L4 laminectomy to relieve the pressure on my spinal cord. My long-term prognosis is very good and I should be back to my normal routine in several months. Praise God! The whole event has provided the backdrop for several life lessons that have positively reshaped my relationship with God. In the following paragraph,s I want to highlight a couple of them that might help you in your spiritual journey as well.
My first takeaway in the whole ordeal was the reminder of how quickly life can change, either in a positive or negative way, and what little control we have over certain dimensions of our lives. Literally overnight, without any clearly recognizable signs that change was coming, my life took a dramatic, and life altering, turn. I went to bed with a little bit of a sore back but the soreness was explainable given my recent circumstances and activity level. There were subtle signs but they were all explainable. The apostle James addresses this human tendency we all have to become overly confident about our future. “Come now, you who say, ‘Today or tomorrow, we shall go to such and such a city, and spend a year there and engage in business and make a profit.’ Yet you do not know what your life will be like tomorrow. You are just a vapor that appears for a little while and then vanishes away” (James 4:13-14). God is sovereign, infinite and dependent on no one and we are not. It is pride and foolishness that lead us to believe we control our tomorrows.
The second area of learning for me had to do with us praying and trusting God to answer. In brief, I ran into insurance issues on the first day and was caught in between the hospital and the insurance company. The details are not really important but the bottom line was the insurance rules and the hospital rules didn’t mesh and as a result insurance didn’t want to cover part of my stay in the hospital. This left me as the patient responsible for several thousand dollars in medical expenses. We immediately began to pray, and asked others to pray, asking God to move and for the expenses to be covered by insurance. Each day I would ask hospital personnel if the issue had been resolved and the only word I would get is they were working on it but since it was the weekend not much could be done. I would not find out until the day I was discharged that God had answered our prayer and those expenses would be covered by insurance.
Over the five days that we waited to hear God revealed a very important truth, that is our trust in His willingness and ability to protect, care for and provide for us is not limited to the answering of a specific prayer in a particular way. Our prayer was that the insurance would cover the expense but what God showed me was my trust in Him needed to be bigger than His answering that prayer. In other words, God’s ability to provide for me in that situation was not limited to His helping us resolve the insurance issue. He could have covered that expense by prompting someone to give us the money, the hospital forgoing the charges or any of a number of creative ways of providing. We tend to pray, and attach our trust in God to, specific prayers and if those prayers are not answered in the way or in the time we expect, our trust in God is shaken. Here a Scripture that comes to mind is Proverbs 3:5-6, “trust in the Lord with all your and lean not on your own understanding, in all your ways acknowledge Him and He will make your paths straight.” We pray based upon what we know and believe to be the best outcome for us and generally in ways that are most comfortable for us. But we need to give God the latitude to answer in the way and time that He knows is best for us and is consistent with the work He is currently doing in our lives.
If we pay attention, there are life lessons to be learned virtually every day, but for sure in the major events of our lives. They are lessons that transform us often in ways that we don’t understand and can’t articulate. But we must learn to recognize them and then receive them as God’s truth for us. What has God been teaching you lately? It might be that life has been hard or joyful, maybe it has taken an unexpected turn. Ask the Holy Spirit what it is that He wants you to learn and allow that truth to deepen and strengthen your relationship with Jesus. I think you will be glad you did!
Author
Pastor Bruce is the Executive Director of God's Living Stones. He lives in Omaha, NE, with his wife Barb. They have two adult children.
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