Cloud by Day, Fire by Night

Before the second surgery I made it a big point to wash up as best as I could.  Obviously moving around wasn’t easy because I wasn’t able to put any weight on my leg, but I got some help from the nurses and washed up as best as I could.  This may seem strange to someone reading this but one of the things the doctors kept saying was that I was young and had taken care of myself.  I know that logically that no one would ever say that they would avoid amputation just because someone didn’t look young but for some reason, I thought that the better I looked (for example to be clean shaved and well showered) the more likely it was that the doctors would try everything they had to save my toe.  Maybe I was crazy in thinking this, but it became an expression of faith on my part.  I believed God was going to heal me and therefore looking my best when I went to the doctor’s office was a way for me to say that “this is going to get better.”

I was told that the second surgery was a success.  The doctor amputated about half of my pointer toe, and he told me that they were optimistic about my big toe.  We all were ecstatic.  I was released from the hospital the next day, and everything was looking up.

As you probably can imagine during my hospital stay, I was on a steady dose of hard painkillers that made my time in the hospital relatively easy from a pain perspective.  I had some pain, but it was more of a dull pain that was always there as opposed to the God-awful, focus-all-my-energy-on-praying-for-mercy pain that I felt right after the accident.  Because of this I was in relatively good spirits and would joke with people who asked me about the accident.  When I left the hospital, they gave me oxycodone and said I could use it as needed every 8 hours.  I used it 3 times a day (along with the full amount of ibuprofen and Tylenol) and this helped a lot though I was regularly conscious of the pain.

About 4 days after I was released, I had an experience that would become the norm during my recovery.  My friends from church decided to come over and we worshipped the Lord.  While I was worshipping God, I got so lost in His Presence that I didn’t feel the pain.  It was incredible and was something that happened every time I would get into His Presence throughout my recovery.  I found 2 things during this time.  First it was incredibly easy to connect with God.  I talked about this at my church’s prayer meeting (see the video below) that I had struggled with doubt early on in my walk with God and had found that when I had doubts that if I worshipped God in the midst of them that He brought me a peace that was not based on my thoughts but was based on connection with Him in that moment.  I had discovered that even in the middle of a storm in my mind that I could still get peace from God.  It is a peace that surpasses understanding and that guards my heart and mind in Christ Jesus (Philippians 4:7).

 

 

I have always linked Philippians 4:7 with Psalm 46:1 which states that God is a “very present help in times of trouble” and have always believed that the key to going through difficult times was to run to God in the middle of them despite how counterintuitive it may feel to do so, because He is actually easier to touch in difficult times.  But even though I had experienced God’s help with spiritual struggles I was amazed at how the Presence of God would take away my consciousness of physical pain. 

I want to make sure I’m understood in this – I didn’t use worship as medicine, and I was still taking my painkillers – but I was genuinely surprised that when I would seek God that I would lose all sense of my discomfort.  Even now as I think back on it, it is something that causes me to wonder.  Though it wasn’t as constant as what the nation of Israel experienced in the wilderness, it was something like the Presence of God being a cloud by day and a fire by night (Exodus 13:21).

The phenomenon in the wilderness of God sending a cloud during the day was to protect Israel from the beating hot sun.  The fire by night was to minimize the dangers of what could be lurking in the darkness.  God manifested Himself in ways that reduced the hardship of their physical circumstances.  They were in this situation and there was now no turning back.  They couldn’t go back to Egypt and at that point weren’t really sure where they would end up, but in the middle of the hot desert days and the dark foreboding nights God showed up in a way that took the edge off of their situation.

Could they have survived in the wilderness without the cloud or the fire?  I’m not a survival expert so I don’t really know, but even if they could have made it without that, this manifestation of God’s help took a little bit of the edge off of a situation that was incredibly difficult.

Things like that cause you to wonder man. 

Previous Chapter

Next Chapter