Today is Stem Cell Transplant Day -01. I get my previously harvested Stem Cells back tomorrow, making that my birthday! (More on this tomorrow.) My last chemo infusion this hospital trip is today, and I am feeling GOOD. My doctor says the nasty side effects of the chemo will probably start kicking in tomorrow or the next day, but we will just have to deal with that tomorrow! My wife is here, and today is a great day to be alive! As a bonus, I opened at random this morning to Psalms 40-- one of my favorite passages in The Message Bible:
I waited and waited and waited for GOD.
At last he looked; finally his listened.
He lifted me out of the ditch,
pulled my feet from deep mud.
He stood me up on a solid rock
to make sure I wouldn't slip.
He taught me how to sing the latest God song,
a praise-song to our God.
More and more people are seeing this:
they enter the mystery, abandoning themselves to GOD."
I wrote previously about getting myself stuck in the salt marsh earlier this year, but my teenage son has his own War Story. We were building a bulkhead (some people call it a sea-wall) and he was down in the trench working on the wall while standing in the sand we were using as backfill. Everything was fine... until it wasn't. The tide started coming in, and it turned that solid sand into quick-sand before we knew it. His legs were stuck, and struggling made it worse. Eventually, we got him out, but only by rigging a strap to the bucket of the excavator for him to sit on. Even then, he said he felt like I was about to pull his legs out of socket. He had a miserable time of it. Strangely, he has no interest in inheriting the family business though. Weird.
Sometimes we get ourselves in situations, and God chooses to deliver us. But as in my son's quicksand, such deliverance sometimes comes with pain. In the beloved children's book "The Voyage of the Dawn Treader," by C.S. Lewis, the boy Eustace found a dragon's lair, put on a gold bracelet from the dragon's hoard, and lay down for a nap. When he arose, he was a dragon! And his arm really hurt where the dragon's bracelet was cutting his arm. He tried to peel off the dragon skin on his own, and it FELT good, but there was always another layer beneath. Finally, he came to realize that he needed the lion Aslan's help. We pick up the story in Eustace's words, as he is telling his friends about his adventure and his deliverance:
"Then the lion said- but I don't know if it spoke-- 'You will have to let me undress you.' I was afraid of his claws, I can tell you, but I was pretty nearly desperate now. So I just lay flat on my back to let him do it.
"The very first tear he made was so deep that I thought it had gone right into my heart. And when he began pulling the skin off, it hurt worse than anything I have ever felt. The only thing that made me able to bear it was just the pleasure of feeling the stuff off. You know-- if you've ever picked the scab off a sore place. It hurts like the billy-oh but it is such fun to see it coming away."
...
"Well, he peeled the beastly stuff right off... and there I was a smooth and soft as a peeled switch and smaller than I had been. Then he caught hold of me- I didn't like that much for I was very tender underneath now that I had no skin on- and threw me into the water. It smarted like anything but only for a moment. After that it became perfectly delicious and as soon as I started swimming and splashing I found that all the pain had gone from my arm. And then I saw why. I'd turned into a boy again..."
God is ABLE to deliver us, from the bog of our own bad decisions and willful disobedience- from sticky situations like the nasty Pluff Mud we find here in the salt marsh of the South Carolina and Georgia Low Country. But deliverance is often not without pain. How much better would it be if we just obey God's still quiet voice in the first place, when he is warning us to stay on the path?
Obeying Him BEFORE we get ourselves stuck in the mud?
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