It is just before 4 a.m., I have been awake since 2.
Burdened with such needs for prayer for friends and loved ones 3-5a.m. tends to
be my "holy" time of prayer. I don't plan it that way. I don't
want it that way, but this has been my lot for the past several years. I have
embraced it. Well, ok, I have gently, hugged it because let's be honest,
I have no choice. Well no good choice that is.
It is dark outside, my pellet stove is going, and I am
nestled into my "special" chair, the chair we bought when I was
going through chemo, and the chair in which I met--reluctantly--with my Lord in
my dark night of the soul, to borrow a phrase from days long past by various
people of God describing the struggles, the doubts, and the discouragements of
even the most admirable of “saints.”
My position in my special chair, the darkness, even the time
of year was pretty much identical to "that night." The only
significant difference this night is the absence of my mini-Schnauzer Gus, who has since preceded my
departure from this life. He was witness to "that
night." It was an agonizing night, pain unspeakable, from a post-op side-effect the result of a surgical intervention a couple days before. When one is
either immune to most pain killers and allergic to opiates, there is no
relief.
As the hours went on I was crying out to the Lord both
literally and prayerfully asking, begging, pleading for some relief, just diminishment
of the pain. It seemed, as I remember a
seminary professor once saying, that that ceiling was brass with my prayers
just bouncing back never making it to the throne room of God. I expect some of you have been there a time or two yourself.
This night, however was different, very
different. Gazing into the flames hypnotically licking the glass of the
window of my warmth, there was no pain, not physical anyway, only the
awareness that comes with hindsight that sometime in the never-ending extremity of my anguish, I awoke
from a slumber. I wasn't even aware of it, I couldn't tell you exactly
when it happened, only that it did.
I cannot look back on that night--even when so graphically
portrayed in all the HD glory of my wonderment, as anything but one of the most
holy meetings with God in my life. The circumstances do not fit such a description but as far as I am concerned, it was--again in hindsight--the
mingling of His holy Majesty--shrouded in the eternal "musterion" of
His Deity.
I do not ever want to repeat it, but I review "that night" as a
highlight of my walk with the Lord and wouldn't rescind it if I had the
choice. Maybe that is what faith is. It doesn't always makes sense,
and yet the Creator makes it sensible in His own way and own time. To God be
the Glory.
