I was reminded this week of an experience I had over ten years ago. My father went in for surgery, had a complication with the surgery, and ended up in ICU. He was in the ICU for three months before he passed away.
When he first went into the ICU, I prayed some of the most fervent prayers I've ever prayed in my life, begging for him to be healed. About halfway through his hospitalization, I was praying as I went to bed one night. I started saying my usual prayer asking for him to be healed. The thought popped into my head, "What if the Lord needs him more than we do? That is so selfish to be asking this. It might be best for everyone involved if he passes away. What if someone on the other side really needs him?" (Paraphrasing the overall emotions, of course. I don't remember exact thoughts...) That night I changed my prayer. I still asked for him to be healed. Then I added that if God needed him more, please help all of us left behind to deal with it.
For six weeks I prayed that way. When he finally did pass away, I was okay with it. Not happy, mind you. It wasn't how I wanted it to work out. But I was okay. Didn't take away the pain of losing him, didn't mean it wasn't an uphill battle for awhile- for the whole family. But we were all okay.
About a week ago my husband drove his parents to a doctor visit in Las Vegas. We expected him to be home around 6- that would be 2 hours for the drive down, 2 hours for the visit, and then 2 hours for the drive home. I actually really expected him home closer to 5. How long could a doctor visit really take? At 6:30 I was really worried. At 7 I was expecting him to be dead on the freeway somewhere. By 7:30 I was sitting with the phone in my hand waiting for the call to come identify all three bodies. (In case people haven't noticed from my blog, one thing I'm REALLY good at is overreacting and panicking where there is absolutely no need for it... I've decided that it's a cute and loveable flaw that is endearing, and so far no one has bothered to correct me about that...)
I was praying the whole time he was gone that they'd travel safely. When I started panicking, my prayers became especially fervent. Then I had that same thought- how selfish of me to beg for everything to be okay. What if that wasn't the Lord's plan? So I started praying the same way I had with my dad. Please let them all be okay, but if not, help me to deal with it.
This time, everything was fine. The appointment turned out to be more involved than any of us had understood and it had taken 3 or 4 hours. That taught me about prayer. When I lost my dad, I had assumed that the spirit had guided me to pray a certain way so that I could be blessed to be okay when the tragedy hit. That taught me that we need to have inspiration with our prayers as well as praying for inspiration. This new experience taught me a lesson I thought I'd already learned, but turns out I hadn't learned it as well as I thought I had. We need to be ready to accept the Lord's will no matter what He asks of us. We may think it's something we can't bear, but we can. We may think that it is just plain suffering, but then come across a time when we realized we learned from something, or we grew from something. I know I grew from losing my dad. I'm never happy he's gone, but I see how much I changed for the better because of that experience. And having that experience made me that much happier to see Scott walking up the driveway after his trip to Vegas.
There is always a purpose, even if there doesn't appear to be one. And that purpose is never the suffering. We can always grow from it, learn from it, be better because of it. We just need to see the blessings instead of the sorrow. We all have sorrow, no matter how happy we are most of the time. It isn't a punishment and it isn't that we are forsaken by God. I feel very blessed in my life, and I think that overall, I am happy probably 90% of the time. Doesn't mean I have never sorrow. And it doesn't mean that sorrow is a bad thing or just for the sake of sorrow.
Just a thought.
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