Reminiscing

Thinking back...21 years ago I was in the hospital lying flat on my back recovering from a C-section and suffering spinal headaches that were excruciating.  My newborn twins were preemies, so tiny and entangled with tubes and wires that it was a major enterprise to try and hold them.   My other two boys were at home and I wondered if they felt abandoned by me.

I asked my doctor how long the spinal headaches would last and he speculated that they could last up to a year or more.  "But the anesthesiologist told me that they'd probably not last more than a week!"  "That's because it was his needle," was the cold reply. He left and I collapsed in a frenzy of angry tears.  When the nurses came in to figure out what was going on, I told them what the doctor had said.  "Oh," they said, "We call him 'Dr. Doom.'  He's always saying things like that."  "Well, I'd like to punch him in the stomach!" I said with a great deal of feeling. Somehow this made all of us laugh.  It was such an unlikely sentiment coming from someone like me that I'm still rather shocked that I said it.  It tells something about the extremity of my emotions at the time.

Alone in my bed, still fretful and disturbed, I turned my anger on God.  How did He expect me to take care of my four children, including these two little ones, if I couldn't even sit up without having a hammer pounding in my skull.  It was untenable!!  Slowly, His presence infiltrated my overwrought heart and I began to remember His amazing love.  It dawned on me that He wouldn't give me these children without making a way for me to care for them.  "I will never fail you nor forsake you."  "I will never fail you nor forsake you."   Never!!!  Ever!!!  

No wonder the psalmists often reminisced, as it were, about God's faithfulness in the past and His promises for the future.  Sometimes in the midst of the storm, it's good medicine to remember sunny skies and rainbows.  

The headaches disappeared shortly after I left the hospital.  (Coincidence? I think not!).   And now those two babies that got such a shaky start in life are strong and healthy young men who are on their own journey with God and faithful in the assembling together of the saints.    

He did not fail nor forsake me then; He will not do so now; He will not ever fail me or forsake me in the future.  

Reminiscing.