“Take him home tonight, and tomorrow take him to the hospital,” our pediatrician said. “I think he may have leukemia.”
Shaking violently, I took our seven-year old son’s hand and walked out into the dazzling California morning sunlight. His pale little face looked up at me. “What’s wrong, Momma?”
“They think there’s something wrong with your blood, honey,” I answered gently.
Brightly colored flowers waved gently in the soft ocean breeze as I moved toward our family wagon with the doctor’s words whirling in my head. “Tomorrow,” he’d said, “tomorrow I’ll arrange for him to enter the University of California San Diego’s research program. That’s what I would do if David were my child.”
Passing the stately palms bravely standing straight, stretching upwards toward the heavens, in the face of fierce Santa Anna winds, I thought, tomorrow, how can I face tomorrow? Tomorrow is gone; there will be no more tomorrows. Nothing in life had prepared me psychologically or spiritually for what to do. Not my church, not my school, not my nursing education…
A seed of faith
Except back when I’d turned eight, my mother had sent me to Sunday School at the little white church on the corner where I heard stories about people who had encountered a living God. Their sacred stories deposited a seed of faith in my young heart as these colorful figures came alive on the flannel graph board: Abraham, to whom God appeared in a dream and a vision and gave him great promises for his future; Isaac, who the Lord warned in a vision not to go down to Egypt during a famine; and Jacob the schemer, who was promised in a dream that God would be with him and bring back home safely. Perhaps I could also someday come to experience a God who would speak to me.
At age 11, I asked Jesus into my heart like they taught me to do. The following year at camp I gave my life to God — to be a missionary nurse in Africa — even though I knew I didn’t know him. However, as I grew up I often thought to myself, Some day I am going to get to know this God who loves the world, some day… but when I get older, after I grow up, marry, and have children…, then, I’ll look for him. I was afraid that if I got to know God, I wouldn’t have any fun. I think I was afraid of what it might cost me. And I wanted to do my own thing.
Lost at sea
I married at nineteen, and during the next eleven years graduated from nursing school and birthed three sons. In February, 1970, we moved to southern California and were living the American dream—until my world suddenly fell apart. An explosion took place—an explosion of a myth: boy meets girl, children follow, and they live happily ever after. All my illusions were shattered. In the wake of this explosion, my life was 
thrown into chaos.
David went into remission and I learned to integrate the new, but ominously-charged routines into our family life: clinic visits, blood tests, bone marrows, and chemo. But on the inside I’d lost my moorings; my inner world lay awash in perilous turmoil. I was lost at sea.
Our pastor visited and read this Psalm to me:
I sought the Lord, and He answered me, and delivered me from all my fears. They looked to Him and were radiant, and their faces shall never be ashamed. This poor (afflicted) man cried and the Lord heard him and saved him out of all his troubles. The angel of the Lord encamps around those who fear Him, And rescues them …The Lord is near to the brokenhearted, and saves those who are crushed in spirit (Psalm 34:4-7, 18).
This was something I could relate to, the Psalmist reaching out to God while in fear for his life. I grasped to my heart his words, like a capsized woman to her lifesaver ring. They became the shining light that guided my path in the years ahead. I resolved to find this One who would hear my cry and deliver me from my fears—so that I would not sink into darkness, despair, and depression like my grandmother had so many years before. (See post, “Legacy of Fear”)
When our world falls apart, we can feel like we are being tossed about in life’s currents without any thing to hold unto. We are in danger of drowning, unless we can take the “night sea journey”— the inner journey of the soul, the road less traveled—and emerge with the meaning and purpose of our individual life. This is the call of God on one’s life.
Questions: Do you ever feel that you’re being tossed about in life’s currents, without a lifesaver? What does this experience mean to you?
I had a similar situation when my three kids were placed in special education in the space of a single year. It wasn’t life threatening, but it was life altering.
Thanks Ann. I think it was Victor Frankl who said that if we can find meaning and purpose in our suffering we will not be destroyed by it; i.e., we will not disintegrate psychologically.