“I’m Not Leaving You”

“I’m Not Leaving You”

I should’ve known it wasn’t a good idea to give God an ultimatum, but I wanted clarity regarding my husband’s medical journey, so I asked for an answer by midnight. I didn’t know what form that answer would take: a phone call, an email, a dream, a talking donkey, but I believed it would happen.

No answer came.

By the next night, I was steam-mopping the floor, which is never a good sign. I talked to God as I mopped, “You didn’t show up when I needed you.”

The thing was, though, even as I fume-mopped, I knew that God loved me. I knew that He saw me and my frustration; He saw my disappointment, and just like how my girls are disappointed when something doesn’t go their way, my father took my fuming all in stride because He could see the bigger picture. The end result.

The next morning, my husband and I returned to Vanderbilt for our radiology consultation. We were almost an hour early, so I went back out to the parking garage to fetch a snack from the van. I was walking toward the doors when I saw the 92-year-old gentleman who had been in line behind us a few weeks before. He wasn’t with his wife but with a dark-haired woman I assumed was his daughter.

I approached them and said, “You were such an inspiration to me when I met you the other day!”

The daughter leaned toward his ear and yelled what I had said. He smiled at me and said, “Where did we meet?”

I said, “In here—” motioning to the hospital— “in line.” I paused and said, “I can’t believe you’re 92!”

His daughter smiled but corrected me. “He’s 91 now.”

He didn’t know what I had said, so she leaned close to his ear and repeated it, and then that man leaned close to me, squared his shoulders, and said, “I was cleaning up the yard one day, and this man said, ‘How old are you?’ And then, when I told him, he said, ‘And how can you prove it?’”

He beamed, having reached the age where age is, again, celebrated.

We chitchatted some more, and then I passed through the doors. The daughter was close behind me. I asked, in a quieter voice, “How’s he doing?”

“All right,” she said. “He’s got one more treatment to go.”

I looked back at him, standing there in a tan outfit nearly identical to the one I had seen him in when we first “met.” His eyes were watery blue behind his glasses. He had a quarter-sized burn mark on his left temple, but beyond that, he appeared fine. He walked easily, conversed with swagger and fire.

What were the odds that our appointments would be on the same day? That we would pass through those same doors? That I would get hungry at that very moment and go back upstairs and then outside, get the protein bar from my bag in the van, go up an elevator, cross a street, and then wind up at the same place—at the same second—as that 91-year-old man who had so greatly impacted me?

And that’s when I suddenly knew: Here was my answer. Here was my sign.

I looked at the daughter and said, “Would it be okay if I prayed for him?”

She looked at her dad and said into his ear, “Is it okay if she prays for you?”

His eyes widened, and then he opened his arms to me and to his daughter. We stood there, huddled together there, cried together there, while at the entrance of a hospital with a revolving door of patients. It was one of the sweetest and purest moments of my life, and it felt like such a gift from God. I hadn’t received “clarity” on the night I had asked to hear, but here, now, standing there in the hospital lobby with a ninety-one-year-old’s arm around my neck, I knew that God did truly hear and see.

Sometimes, His answers aren’t as clear as we would like, or on the timetable we would like, and we panic and fume, “You didn’t show up when I needed you.”

We feel orphaned and left, which is the enemy’s attempt to thwart the intimacy created by love.

I see this orphan tendency in my two older daughters when one inevitably becomes a straggler as we’re walking down the sidewalk or crossing the park. They can’t see our destination is right over the hill or right inside the door, and they panic that they’re being left behind until I stop and say, “I’m not leaving you. I’m not leaving you.”

I believe that’s what Jesus wants to say to us, His children, not His orphans. “I’m not leaving you. My timetable might not be your timetable. But I promise . . . you’re not being left behind.”

Was there ever a time in your life when you felt “left behind”? How did God show up in a different way?