Thursday, March 1, 2012

Waiting

Just about everyday we get asked this question:

What are you going to do?


I would love to respond with a detailed plan. If I had my way each bullet point would have a time and a date next it. Every step would be laid out so that I could know ahead of time what to expect.

But God does not work that way. Much to my dismay he wants me to trust him. I am a very slow learner.

You see when Ethan first started having seizures we were itinerating missionaries. Which in english means that we were traveling around the country raising funds to get to the mission field. For us that was Indonesia. We are Assembly of God Missionaries so we have to have all of our funds raised before we can board a plane and leave for our destination. It took a huge step of faith for us to leave our amazing church in Montana to do what we believed God had called us to. We were almost finished with our budget. We were all set to go!

Then in a matter of minutes our world was turned upside down. Our perfectly normal two year old had his first seizure and little did we know that this would be the first of thousands.

The next few months brought may trips from our home in Montana to the children's hospital in Denver Colorado. If we were not speaking at churches on the road, then we were on the road to Denver. His symptoms only got worse with each passing day.

"What are you doing Lord?" I would find myself saying. There was no answer.

After countless emergency room visits and trips back and forth to Denver, Ethan was diagnosed with Doose Syndrome. As I have told many of our friends this is an 'idiopathic epilepsy.' There is no known cause and there is no known cure. For me this was so hard to comprehend. In this day and age with all of the technology that we have we don't know what causes this?

Again my world was turned upside down. We were getting ready to leave for one of the most remote places in the world. We had said, "Yes Lord! We will go." What is happening? Is there no way to fix what was happening to Ethan? We continued to pray. We prayed for healing. We prayed for answers. We prayed that God would work it out. Still no answers.

Then the questions started from those around us.

What are you going to do?


Our only answer was to continue to follow what God had asked us to do. Last we checked he asked us to be faithful, to trust him, and to follow him. But that all looked so different now.

Now there is no time line. There is no departure date. There is no method to treat Ethan's seizures. We are living each and ever day not knowing what the next moment will hold. Ethan could fall down the stairs and have a tonic clonic seizure at any giving moment. (that happened this week.) Or he could be doing great and have only a few head drops during the day. (It is amazing how my definition of "great" has changed dramatically in the last year.) We only know what we are going to do right now in this moment. God has a plan for the rest it. Every day I am learning to trust him more and more.

We have been seeing doctors for about 11 months now, and we still have no definite answers.

So what are we going to do?


We are going to continue to trust him. We are going to continue to be faithful to the call that we know he has place on our lives. We are going to continue to admit that we don't have all of the answers, but God does.

"God has now revealed to us his mysterious plan regarding Christ, a plan to fulfill his own good pleasure. And this is the plan: At the right time he will bring everything together under the authority of Christ—everything in heaven and on earth. Furthermore, because we are united with Christ, we have received an inheritance from God, for he chose us in advance, and he makes everything work out according to his plan."
Ephesians 1:9-11



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