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.

We Need Your Prayers

As some of you know, my dad was diagnosed with cancer around 6 years ago. It was primarily in his spleen and that's still where 80% of it is located now. It's swelled a lot and is pressing on his stomach, making it hard to eat and severely weakening him.

After years of chemo, this Wednesday at 3 o'clock he's going in to have his spleen removed. It's a pretty serious surgery and he really needs your prayers. Specifically he needs your prayers against infection after the surgery since his cancer has left him with a very poor immune system.

My mom, my brother, I and the rest of my family would really appreciate your prayers as well. I know I'm pretty scared at the moment. I'm holding tightly to Jesus right now, as is the rest of my family. He's brought us this far, and I know He'll continue to complete this good work that He's started in us.

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

That just happened!

I just can't get over all of the amazing things that I got to see take place last night at church. So I thought I would throw a recap up on here since I want you all to rejoice in what the Lord is doing, not to mention that this blog is in major need of an update.

First of all, Sayan comes from a Muslim family and has been one her whole life...until Wednesday night at Fusegroup. She was told the Gospel by her awesome small group leader, Leslie, and accepted Christ that night! Yesterday she got baptized.

Back in November, we challenged our students to start inviting people that they know need Jesus to Fuse. Joe Harwood took this to heart and starting bringing David Wilson to church. David hadn't been to church since he was three but on December 7th he accepted Christ! Now he and Joe are tag teaming all of their friends and evangelizing their school together.

David got baptized last night and was able to get his mom (who hadn't been to church in over 30 years) and sister to come watch and they both accepted Christ last night too! His sister has been to Fuse before and was invited by Jessica Harwood. I think the highlight of the night for me was seeing Jessica dancing around the atrium singing, "She stood up! She stood up!" about her friend accepting Christ.

During the part of the invitation where you're not supposed to look around, I looked around and saw one of my other students, Ashby, raising his hand in the back! I'm ran up to him after the service to hug him, and I can't wait to call him this week and talk about it with him.

All of that, plus I got to see tons of our students getting baptized. The Lord is so good and faithful! I can't believe I get to be a part of all of this!

A Man of God

Sorry I've checked out on blogging for the past couple of months. I haven't been as connected at the hip with my computer lately as I've been in the past, so I'm having to remind myself to update this sucker. Anyway, on to the good stuff.

So I was reading 1 Kings 13 tonight and I got to thinking about the man of God it talks about. I'd recommend that you read 1-10 so that this stuff makes sense. Go ahead, I'll wait.

Good stuff right?

It's always been easy to envision this story going down by God appearing to this guy and telling him to go to the king of Israel and tell him that his enemy's kid is going to grow up and go all ritual sacrifice on him. Don't eat anything or drink anything until you get back and make sure you don't come back the same way.

But now I'm fairly confident that it didn't go down this way, and here's why: he actually did it. I just have a hard time believing that the above sales pitch would really make him giddy to go to the king. God knows how much we can handle and only lets us in on just so much. I think God's a bigger fan of faith than He is information.

I'm thinking the situation probably went down a little more along the lines of God telling this guy to leave town and head towards Israel. When he started to pack some food and water, God told him that he wouldn't be needing any of that. On his journey God provided for this guy who was probably getting pretty stinking hungry by the time he got to his destination and at one point told him, "make sure you come back a different way."

Once he reached his destination, God told him to head towards the palace and when he reached the doors, told him what he needed to say. After God had been providing for him for his trip to the king and having seen first hand how faithful God is, it probably wasn't as hard to say those things to the king.

Here's what pumps me up about that story (as accurate as it might or might not be): I think I'm on the same path. All I know as of right now is that I feel led to head to Europe for a month. I'm not sure why and, to be honest, I'm not even 100% sure where yet. It pumps me up to think about the fact that God might have something so huge in store for me that if He told me right now, there's no way I'd do it. He just might have something so big in front of me that He's got to take me around the world to prepare me for it or even to bring me to it. It's so exciting to think about the fact that I might be in the same position that someone who was only known as a man of God was once in.

Just a few thoughts...

If my relationship with God becomes a daily routine then I'll be able to think I'm doing alright as long as I'm able to check everything off my list. This includes praying and reading my Bible every morning and having a quiet time at night. I've gotten to where I feel guilty if I don't do the things on my list. I don't want to go to God out of guilt. I want to run to God out of a complete hunger and need for Him.

So I'm going to start shaking things up a little bit. I'm going to try to change the way I pray, change the way I read my Bible and try to change what I consider to be a quiet time.

If there's one thing I've learned about God this year, it's that He's a lot bigger than I could have ever dreamed and I haven't even hit the tip of His greatness. What I have isn't enough. I want more and I will be restless until I get more.