How to Keep Your Eyes Above the Waves [Even in the ICU]

It started with me staring at the waves crossing a screen. Waves monitoring blood pressure. Pulse. Intracranial pressure on the left and right sides. Blood oxygen levels and spO2. And then there were the waves on the EEG, Blue lines and red lines crossing the screen from left to right, getting to the end and immediately starting over again. 

And maybe a song came on the radio or maybe I heard a whisper when I wasn’t even in the room full of waves, but I heard that old, familiar reminder to keep my eyes above the waves.

My mind flashed back to a familiar scene: a small boat on choppy waters, a man walking on the water toward the boat. There’s a very dramatic Hollywood version that my mind creates to envision it all. Simon who would become Peter says, “Lord, bid me come,” and Jesus says, “Come” and in a flash, he steps out of the boat onto the water.

He sees the waves and the wind and is distracted — but Jesus is right there to catch him, to grab his hand, to help him back into the boat.

Our family has been in a storm for a little more than two weeks now. Our beautiful second son is in a hospital bed post brain aneurism inside AVM rupture, post angiogram, post medically-induced coma and dose after dose of this and that and something else mixed in to try to keep him going. With dozens of lines, a feeding tube and vent and EVDs draining the excess blood from his ventricles it is hard not to watch the waves.

But somehow the Hero Hubs and I feel sure something bigger is going on. Lives are being touched. Blake’s story is somehow changing other people’s stories. Ours included.

Over the past 17 days I had to get really honest with God. I almost went through a mental checklist to process how I felt about the storm around us:

I wasn’t angry, but I was sad.

I wasn’t hopeless, but I was definitely hurting.

And I started to think about what exactly I wanted to ask God in the middle of this situation. I’ve already told Him I’ll serve Him for as long as I have breath. Am I going to say never mind? Am I going to say “If you don’t give me this miracle, I will just let my heart grow cold and quietly leave faith at the door?”

I remembered again that time in John 6, when Jesus was teaching some things that were difficult for people to understand. A lot of people didn’t get what He was saying, and they took offense, so they decided not to follow Him anymore. Instead of pressing in to gain some understanding — and He does promise to give us wisdom if we ask for it — they decided His teachings just weren’t what they wanted to believe and they walked away.

So Jesus turns to the twelve and says, “Do you want to go away, too?”

And that water-walking brave and blustery Peter says, “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life. Also we have come to believe and know that You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.” {See John 6: 60-70}

And that is exactly where I feel like we are right now. We have nowhere else to turn. All our faith is in Jesus. All our eggs are in His basket. In this hardest of places, maybe it would be easy to get offended. To get angry. To shake a fist at the sky and go back to fishing and decide Jesus hasn’t turned out to be Who we thought after all.

But then I remember this verse I memorized way back in college:

“The Lord is not slack concerning His promise, as some count slackness, but is longsuffering toward us, not willing that any should perish but that all should come to repentance.” {2 Peter 3:9}

And I think about that helicopter ride to the hospital, and how we pulled away from the ground and everything looked so small. And I felt like God was saying, this seems really big right now because you’re so close to it, but give it time, child, and you’re going to have a different perspective. It will not look like a mountain. It will not seem like the biggest thing you’ve ever faced.

And then I look at that verse up there again and know this: God loves my family, and He loves yours, too. And if we can walk through something hard, and trust Him to see us through it, maybe other people can somehow see Him here. What if other people see the hope we have in the toughest of circumstances — and they come to know the goodness of Jesus, and then He walks them through their storms? 

We’re all going to have storms, right? In this broken world where everything is not-yet-as-it-should-be, we’re all going to experience suffering. There will be pain. Relationships will fail. Sickness will come. 

But hope is what makes suffering bearable. Hope is the anchor for the soul in the midst of all the storms. The very thing I’ve whispered to my precious boy in his bed in the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit is the thing I need to hear in my own soul: “It will not feel like this forever, precious. These troubles have an end.”

While we walk this hard road that has sometimes made us feel as if our very hearts would burst from our chests for the pain of it, something has been forged. In Narnia it was called the Deep Magic: and it’s a sort of iron in our veins that says, “We have hope and it’s unshakable. We will always have hope, because we have Jesus.”

I hope these words will speak to you on days when you feel like you don’t have a firm place to stand, when you’re out of the boat and you have nothing to stand on but the words of a Savior who says, “Come.” He is enough. His Word and His goodness — they are trustworthy. He is not slack concerning His promises–but He works all things together for the good of ALL of us. Our stories are an interwoven tapestry. The cries of our hearts together create a symphony. Together we Raise a Hallelujah.

Remember when you’re there, friends, out of the boat surrounded by unsteady circumstances on every side: THIS is how you keep your eyes above the waves. You keep your eyes on Jesus.

xCC

Please keep praying for our sweet Blake. He has come a long way on his journey through the PICU. He is no longer in a medically-induced coma, but is still in need of critical care and we still have decisions to make about the next steps for his healing. He still has a long walk to freedom, a long road to fight his way to fully recovered. Please pray for his peace along this journey, and for our family as we are in more than one place right now. Pray we’ll have wisdom as we navigate the road ahead — especially today. 

Please keep Raising a Hallelujah for Blake.

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