A Call to Prayer

I have a lot of things to say here, so bear with me. Dad has been in the hospital for four weeks as of today and things have been getting worse for the past couple of weeks. In fact, he's been getting a lot worse for the past year and the doctors couldn't figure out why. When they looked at his spleen after if was taken out, they found that he has lymphoma which is what is causing him to spiral downward so much right now.

It's bad. Dad might not be with us much longer. In fact, short of the Lord stepping in, there's really no chance of him surviving this. And that's my whole point of this post. I've never been in a situation like this where I've felt so powerless. I feel weak, broken, hurt and more at peace than I really should be.

The thing is, lymphoma, leukemia, breathing tubes, surgery, all of these things are God's light work. He can heal my dad with a whim if He wants to. So that's the first thing I'm asking. Pray HUGE prayers! Dad's still here and I'd like to keep it that way. The closer he gets to death and the more hopeless it looks, the more glory the Lord will receive if He heals him.

Yes, God still does "that stuff," so unashamedly pray that God would fully restore my dad. Pray with authority against the lymphoma and leukemia by name.

Also, for those closest to dad who read this, I want to say to you, it's okay to ask "why?" But just make sure you ask to right why. Don't selfishly ask God why He's taking dad away from us. The honest truth is, my dad is an amazing man and I never deserved to have any time with a good father, let alone 24 years. Instead, ask why God is doing this, wondering what greater thing He has planned. The Lord doesn't want to hurt His children, so if we're hurting, He has a good purpose behind it. I promise you, it hurts the Lord more to see what my dad is going through than it hurts any of us because He loves my dad more than we ever could. I've never died for my dad, Jesus has. So don't be afraid to pray and ask why. Just make sure you ask the right why.

Please, let's rally together and beg the Lord for the life of my dad. I have faith that He can heal him. But if He doesn't, join me in praying for clarity and figuring out what purpose there is in all of this. Romans 8:28 says, "And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to His purpose." I believe this and I pray that you do too. So search out what good God seeks to accomplish in this hour.

And I'll leave you with my verse of comfort again:

"For this light momentary affliction if preparing us for an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison."

The Weight of Glory

So I think it's safe to say that the stuff going on with my dad officially sucks. He got moved recently to North Greenville hospital so that he could get physical therapy while he gets weaned off of the ventilator. He's getting better, but since he doesn't really have an immune system, we seem to always be one mishap away from badness.

But God does a good job of preparing His children for the trials that He knows they'll go through. And the day before dad went in for his first surgery the Lord reminded me of a verse He'd gotten my attention with a couple of months earlier.

"For this light momentary affliction is preparing us for an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison." 2 Corinthians 4:17

That verse is very comforting and reveals so much about the nature of God. God's glory has weight. I have a hard time even comprehending that. Here's the best example I can think of. If I have never been to the gym and go to the bench press, I won't be able to do much beyond the bar. But if I were to go a few times a week, then months later, I'd be able to lift a lot more.

God's glory is heavy. We can't handle all of it, but God wants us to have it. It takes God training and preparing us to be able to handle more of it. What might seem overwhelming at first, with God's preparation, can be experienced more easily. But God doesn't want us to be satisfied with a comfortable level of Himself, so He allows us to be prepared for more of His infiniteness (to create a word), and in the case of this verse, preparation comes from trials.

The hardest times give us the chance to rely on God more. The more we rely on God, the more we're in His presence and the more we're in His presence, the more we'll be ready to handle more of Him.

We can't be content with staying at the same level in our relationship with God. If we are, that's just laziness, and laziness is sin. So in order to get closer to God and to experience more of His glory, we have to be willing to go through crap.

As bad as this stuff is, if going through it brings me and my family closer to the Lord, then it will all be worth it.

The Details

In case you're wondering, here's what's been going on this past week. On Wednesday dad was supposed to go in for surgery to have his spleen removed, as the last post talked about, but things didn't go according to plan. They knew his spleen was big, but they didn't know that it would weigh 15 pounds. In fact, anything that could go wrong with the surgery went wrong.

Because of the size, his spleen had caused a lot of trauma to his other organs and there was a lot of bleeding inside of him. So after the surgery they moved him immediately to the ICU. He was put on a ventilator and had all kinds of fun machines plugged into him.

He ended up having a lot of fluid inside of him. In fact there was so much fluid in his abdomen it was cutting off his breathing. But they didn't know it was fluid and they thought it might be blood. So they told us that they'd needed to do surgery Thursday and that there was a chance he could bleed to death. By a miracle, he made it through it fine. Then on Saturday they went in to do the final surgery to close him up and take out all of the packing inside of him that they were using to stop the bleeding.

They were able to close him up all the way, and they thought they had gotten all of the blood. But because of the number of sponges and other things inside of him, they did an x-ray to make sure that they got it all. They saw something in there, but they couldn't tell what it was so they went back in. There wasn't anything in there, but because they went back in they found a spot that was still bleeding that if they hadn't caught it, they would have had to went in a fourth time to clear it up. I'm chalking that up to a miracle from Jesus.

Right now he's getting weened off of the drugs and the ventilator. Hopefully he will be completely off of it by tomorrow night or Wednesday. He's waking up a little now and will look at us and shake hims head when we talk to him and he'll smile at us too. He has pneumonia now, but they caught it early, so it shouldn't be as bad as it could be.

God's been so good to us. We've seen miracle after miracle and the Lord has been by our side the entire time. God's peace is all over the ICU. I keep hearing stories of God working in people's lives.

Please keep praying for us and my dad. I know that God can heal him completely! He still has cancer, so feel free to pray against that still.

Thank you all for the support so far through this! I'm so blessed to have all of you in my life. I love you all so much and I don't know what I'd do without you.