Waiting On The Lord

One of my responsibilities with the SBTC  is in Facilitating Ministries. Here I work with a large number of pastors and directors of mission from Wichita Falls to Georgetown.

One of those pastors, Doug Helms (Crowley, TX) and his family are going through a very trying time. Their 17-year-old son, Peter, was severely injured (head trauma) in an auto accident 4 weeks ago. He is in a coma at John Peter Smith Hospital in Ft. Worth.

There is a page on Facebook with continual updates. Peter’s mother, Selah, posted this yesterday. I emailed Doug and asked permission to re-post. He has given permission in the hope that God will be glorified in all this.

These are Selah’s musings as she waits by her son’s side. May God strengthen the Helms and us as we learn through the grace in which this family is living.  And please pray for Peter and the family.

From Peter’s Mom:

Today marks the beginning of week 4 since Peter’s car accident. The doctors and nurses tell us that, though it seems like a long wait to us, it’s actually still very early on in the recovery process for an injury like Pete’s.

My husband reminds me often (and I’m thankful) that we are not just waiting on Peter to wake up, but that we are also learning to wait on the Lord, and that there are promises in Scripture for those who wait on the Lord. I really like C.J. Mahaney’s definition of waiting on the Lord. It showed up in a post by Sunny Shell on the group wall: “It takes faith to wait tranquilly for something for which we have a promise from God, but no date. . . . Waiting is not resignation; waiting is active trust in God to provide fulfillment in His perfect timing, according to His ultimate purpose of glorifying His Son.”

As we wait on the Lord “more than the watchmen wait for the morning,” He promises to renew our strength. He also promises that He will give what is good to His children, just as an earthly father would – that if we ask Him for bread, He won’t give us a stone. So we come to Him fully trusting His character, asking for bread. Then, we wait. But we know while we wait that in whatever manner God chooses to give to us, what he gives will be bread and not a stone. We cry out to the Lord, asking for many things regarding Peter’s healing, and we know His answer will be good, and it will come in His perfect timing.

People ask me how I’m doing. Well, as I’m learning to wait, here’s what I am doing: the duty of this particular day. It’s a discipline included in waiting – that I learn what my duty is only for the day at hand, without giving in to speculating on future days.

What is trust and what is obedience for this day? I’ll tell you what it looks like, practically speaking. For one thing, I am learning much about physical therapy and respiratory therapy. We do Passive Range of Motion (PROM) exercises with Peter throughout the day, along with talking to him about things he is familiar with. Here’s the schedule we have been loosely adhering to around the interruptions that typically happen in hospital-life:

7:00 a.m.–Family member who spent the night with Peter wakes up. Miriam Simmons (dear friend who was once an ER nurse, now homeschooling mom of Peter’s good friend Caleb) arrives. She goes through PROM with Peter, talks about date, time and weather, sings “Give Thanks” to him and reads Isaiah 40. Nurses come through and give him meds.

9:00–PROM with Dad. Doug reads through questions #1-5 of the Shorter Catechism with Peter, including Scriptural proofs. Peter memorized the Shorter Catechism in high school. Doug sings “Before the Throne of God Above,” prays with Peter and talks to him. He also reads James 1, as Peter memorized the book in the past.

11:00–PROM with Doug again, then questions #6-10 of Shorter Catechism. Doug then sings another hymn, reads James 2 and talks to Pete. Then we put on YoYo Ma playing the Unaccompanied Bach Cello Suites in the background. It’s soothing.

2:00–PROM with Mom. Then Mom reads James 3 to Peter, talks to him and sings “Great is Thy Faithfulness.” Often I also read Shakespeare’s version of King Henry’s speech before the battle of Agincourt to him. As Pete is an avid history buff, this was another piece of memory work he chose a couple of years ago.

4:00–PROM with Mom again. Then James 4 and “Great is Thy Faithfulness” again. Then I either put on “Eine Kleine Nachtmusik” and some other Mozart, or some of the pieces he has recently performed in piano recitals.

7:00–PROM with Andrew. Then Andrew reads James 5 to him, and we all sing “Jesus, I My Cross Have Taken” around his bed. This is often the song Pete chooses for his turn during family devotions. When Caleb, Hope, and Beth are there, it really sounds good because they sing in parts. We miss Pete though, because Peter is the only one in the family who sings the bass line, so it doesn’t sound as fully rounded out without him. We hope he can hear the difference, and that it will prompt him to wake up and help us out.

Last night, Andrew and I were trying to be creative in coming up with some things to talk to Peter about. “Twenty Questions” has been an old family favorite from the time the kids were young. So we played it over Pete’s bed. Andrew guessed Knight Roland and Neville Chamberlain from my clues. I guessed Bede, but got stumped on King Hrothgar from his clues. So he won. Pete would have guessed King Hrothgar.

“Wait for the Lord; be strong, and let your heart take courage; wait for the Lord!” Psalm 27:14

Selah

SERVING A GOD OF SOVEREIGN PURPOSE

God is good!

I am not a “Calvinist”, but I may be leaning…:). Not really. But I do believe in the Sovereignty of God and in the purpose of God for all things. And I am rebuked for being among those to whom Jesus referred as “O ye of little faith!”.

When I discovered my journal missing after our family vacation, I grieved. I have ideas, prayers, private thoughts, etc. I called where we stayed and the company from whom we leased the van. No journal. I prayed. One day last week I learned to not trust “impressions”. I had a strong impression the journal was in my mail box. I rushed to the post office and there wasn’t even lint in it, much less a journal.

Thursday morning I got a text message from Greg Wells. Greg is a good friend from 121 Community Church. We meet every other week. Greg helped sponsor our SBTC Pastor’s Golf Retreat. His text simply said, “Did you lose a journal?” I was stunned and discovered he had my journal. We met for lunch. While waiting for him I told the story to the waitress whom I will call “Kelly”. Pray for “Kelly”.

Here is the story. Enterprise had no 15 passenger vans when I first tried to find one. But a few days before leaving, I got a call: “Mr. Elmore, we have located a van for you.” Apparently they got it from Capps (we paid $200 less than what Capps was going to charge me). Little did I know that the youth from 121 Community Church were going to New Orleans and were renting vans from Capps. When Capps cleaned the vans from the 121 trip, they found a journal in the console. They called the youth pastor and he picked it up. He saw my name, knows me, and knows Greg and I meet. He put it in Greg’s in-box.

I told this story to the “Kelly”. When Greg and I were finishing lunch, she brought the bill and brought up the story and said, “God works in mysterious ways.” The story on “Kelly”. She was not raised in a Christian home. She said she did not go to church until she was old enough to choose for herself. She began going to a church in the southern part of the metroplex but dropped out because some would “party on Saturday night and act holier-than-thou on Sunday”. In the conversation we discovered that she believes she is a Christian and she and her fiance are looking for a church. They want to begin their marriage right. Greg gave her his card.

I said to “Kelly”, “I don’t want to make more of this than it is and I really don’t know all that is going on. But if someday in heaven I discover the whole purpose for this was to encourage you to live for Jesus, I would jump up and down with joy.”

God is sovereign! Pray for “Kelly”. I thank those who knew and prayed I would find my journal. It is beside me.

CAN YOU ‘GOOGLE’ THIS?

I have a good pastor friend who related a story about the 7-year-old son of one his work-out friends. It seems dad and mom are taking their parenting role seriously and trying to teach their young son in the ways of the Lord. Of course, every child has questions that Dr. W. A. Criswell would refer to as being in “the imponderables of God”.

The question: “Dad, why did God make Kiwi green?” Inquiring 7 year olds want to know. The dad thought, and came up with this gem. “Son, I don’t know, but someday when you get to heaven, you can ask God.”

The 7-year-old thought for a moment and said, “Nah, I think I’ll go google it”! Out of the mouth of babes….

So that got me thinking. Can everything be googled? Certainly the words and concepts can. But what about the action?

Can you google faith? Or is it lived out in our messy world and our messy attempts to serve God?

Can you google prayer? Or must we cry out to God with understanding even when we do not understand?

Can you google parenting? I was searching in an old file cabinet in the garage and ran across a file my wife had labeled, “Letters From Dad”. These came from my days as an itinerant evangelist. I peeked. In them were two that brought tears. One to my son and another to one of my daughters. They were for sure filled with love and encouragement. But one phrase stood out in both: “When I get home we will…”.

Those are days past and thank God for his grace and mercy. Our relationship as a family is very strong and for that I praise God. My relationship with our children is strong. But I missed some things that are precious and those days will not return.

The Lord may indeed restore years the locusts have eaten, but he will not restore the childhood of anyone’s children and give a “do-over” at parenting. You can’t “google” that! You have to live those days as they come.

Really, can you google any relationship? No. Not even Facebook, Twitter, nor email is a substitute for a warm hug, a firm handshake, a smile, a kind word, or a pat on the back.

God made us personal beings. The human need for relationship is hard-wired in each of us.

The family is at the core of this. I believe in the Church. It is the Body of Christ. But when God created the world, he took five days to create a place that would sustain and perpetuate life. Then he created the first male and female and put them in that place that would sustain and perpetuate life. They were to “Be fruitful and multiply; fill the earth and subdue it; have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, and over every living thing that moves on the earth” (Gen. 1:28).

The Church does not exist to become an entity in and of itself. The Church exists to extend the mission of God and the most basic mission of God is the “church” in your home (Psalm 78:1-8; Ephesians 5:22-6:4).

And you can’t google that! And as messy as it can sometimes be, it has to be lived out in daily life and daily surrender to Jesus.