Category: Uncategorized

Three practical gifts for a friend at the hospital, plus the one you help God give

We spent the first few days of our son’s life in a frustrating and scary loop of medical interventions. This week we found ourselves in that exact same loop, but the baby was two months older and the threats were bigger. We wound up being admitted through the ER at the children’s hospital in Stanford.

I asked a lot of questions and lamented. A year ago exactly I was doing twelve hour days in the hospital and losing my mom. This time I feared I was losing my son. 

We’re home and now have a pathway to further testing, but definitely not out of the woods. And while I can’t put a neat bow on this week, I can share a few gift ideas to help you help your friend in the hospital, ranging from what can and can’t be wrapped.

1. Prayers

It’s a gift to be prayed for, and a gift to know you are being prayed for. Our materialist culture likes to make it seem like prayer is the Christian’s equivalent to sharing a charity post on social media without actually donating. Our world thinks offering to pray is doing nothing. While I would agree that some Christians neglect to act or serve others in tangible ways, we can’t throw prayer out the window and label it as unproductive. We pray simply because we’re told God himself listens. A verse that often comes to mind is Psalm 116:2:

Because he bends down to listen,
    I will pray as long as I have breath!

We asked friends to pray our baby wasn’t experiencing something life threatening, and asked them to pray that the necessary procedure would go well. My friends from Bible study specifically prayed that Macklin would stay calm for the eight hours he wasn’t allowed to eat. Miraculously, our two month old was completely calm as he was wheeled into the pre-op meeting.

Sometimes the gift is that the prayer gets answered the way we want (which was our case this week, praise God) and sometimes the gift is just knowing people care. I found out one friend had contacted her entire cancer support group to pray for our baby, while another had friends all over the world asking for God’s favor on our behalf. It can get very lonely in little hospital rooms, but we knew God’s people from all over the world were holding us.

2. Provision

Your grieving/hospitalized/new parent/in transition friend? They want DoorDash gift cards. We arrived at the ER Sunday night around 9pm, got admitted to a room at 4am, and went to sleep around 5am Monday morning. Needless to say, we were zombies that first full day of testing, but we zombies who were able to order wonderful Philz coffee.

Family and family friends in CA and TX made sure we were covered financially if Calvin had to leave work for a while, and friends from work pitched in to make sure we could order food. When we were driving home, two couples were already duking it out over who got to bring us dinner! (Okay, that actually didn’t happen, but we did have two sets of friends who volunteered for the same day.) We also came home to our cat’s bowl full, our trash taken out, and the dishes washed and put away. It was absolutely beautiful and humbling to be provided for on all fronts in such practical ways.

3. Presence

Your presence is the one gift you can’t send via delivery driver. My aunt and uncle came one afternoon to sit with us and hold Macklin. They brought a bag of snacks, toiletries, phone chargers, socks, and even a sweatshirt I ended up sleeping in.

The day of our son’s procedure, my aunt came back and hung out with us in the hospital cafe. For the first time in days, I was able to take my mind off of the worst case scenario and even laugh. The hospital is obviously not home, but having people there who met our needs so thoughtfully proved that the right visitors can help make it feel less clinical and cold. The granola bars and watermelon candies were helpful, but presence was a gift I will never forget.

4. Perspective

This is one only God can give, but if you are loving your friend intentionally, you can actually help God give it.

When we were sent by the pediatrician to the ER, one big question plagued my mind: If all my fears come true, will God be on the other side of the worst day of my life? 

Receiving the gifts I listed above helped me to answer that question because I saw how God uses ordinary acts of love to be His hands and feet.

We were scared, frustrated, confused, unsettled, and lamenting, but the gifts of prayer, provision, and presence helped us to see that even if the worst case scenario became our reality, we would not be alone in it. He was with us and fighting for us through the kindness of people who loved Him through loving us.

Thanks be to God.

Jesus of my grief

I am a mother without a mother.

That’s something I’ve known since we found out about our baby in October, but it’s a thought that creeps in more and more frequently now that my hospital bag is packed and the car seat has been installed for over a month.

I fully expected to feel the cold fog of grief on Mother’s Day. I knew smiling on birthdays and important milestones would perhaps feel forced this year. However, nothing could have prepared me for the crisis of faith on a normal Tuesday. No one could have told me how tragic and seemingly random it would all feel. No one told me how heavy and truly cruel it could feel to carry grief. 

It manifests as stifled cries and exhaustion. Grief can be hidden to the eye with a quick smile, but it’s a sandbag you can never quite set down.

And yet, the scriptures are full of these weird examples of the universe’s inventor kneeling in the dust with those who are weighed down in grief. Psalm 56:8, for example: 

“You keep track of all my sorrows. You have collected all my tears in your bottle. You have recorded each one in your book” (Psalm 56:8).

There are times I’m tempted to believe that God simply does not care anymore. If he did, why would He allow me to lose three family members within the span of six months? Why would he stand by through one of the most painful relational fallouts I’ve ever experienced? Why did I have to lose my mother right before I became one?

I don’t get all the answers to my ‘whys’ this side of eternity—but I do get assurance of His closeness in the darkness. 

We are reminded that in the end, the Lord will wipe our tears away (Revelation 21:4). To collect tears, and to wipe them, you have to get pretty close. Both actions require the Comforter to touch the face of the broken. 

And if you’re in grief right now, let me assure you that Jesus’ hand is touching your face. He is collecting your tears. He has recorded your sorrows. 

I pray that even in grief, you will sense His nearness. I pray that in the bleakness you will seek Christ in the dark. 

The Jesus who held out his hands out on the cross can still hold you now. 

The one who wipes away sin and death will personally wipe your tears from your face. 

Evergreen

I had put myself in an awkward position. No—literally. Forced to recline at an odd angle because our loveseat’s a bit too small for both me and Calvin to stretch out, my view was the back of a whiteboard Calvin uses for studying. One side listed several meds he needed to memorize for school; the other side was a verse.

I had just come home late again, tired physically, but mostly emotionally. I had prayed out loud on the way home (something I do a lot), talking to Jesus about His plans and purposes for my life, telling Him how thankful I am to be a sheep in the pasture of a Good Shepherd.

Now I was squished on the cramped couch, staring up at the verse on the back of whiteboard: 

“Know that the Lord is God. It is he who made us and we are his; we are his people, the sheep of his pasture.” (Psalm 100:3).

There’s no way I would have seen the verse had I not been so exhausted I had to lie on the couch. There’s also no way I would have seen it had I not been in an uncomfortable position. 

Friend, this is the goodness of God. Not that my situation always changes or that I get exactly what I’m praying for the moment I ask, but that I get Jesus for my situation—the presence and the peace and friendship of the One who knows and loves me. I don’t chalk up things like reading the very verse from which my prayers were born to coincidence. Doing so would be like saying my husband bringing home my favorite flowers on my birthday is a coincidence. 

The more I walk and talk and just sit with him, the more I learn that Jesus is personal, and that relationship with Him is not solely a life of sacrifice and suffering. There most definitely is sacrifice and suffering involved—required, even—but there is also sweetness. There is also beauty. There is also the fullness of joy. Even if my situation doesn’t change and the rain doesn’t come in a year of drought, I still get all of Jesus to sustain me. 

“But blessed is the one who trusts in the Lord, whose confidence is in him. 

They will be like a tree planted by the water

that sends out its roots by the stream.

It does not fear when heat comes;

its leaves are always green.

It has no worries in a year of drought

and never fails to bear fruit.” (Jeremiah 17:8).

No crying He makes?

The littlest shepherd in the front row tilted his head as his pillowcase head covering fell over his eyes…again. Angels in garland halos sang while a 5 year-old Mary carefully rocked the Jesus doll. It was a chaotic, adorable scene, and the congregation was delighted. 

I sat on the floor in the front row, trying to help the kids with their cues. When the song “Away in a Manger” came on, however, a familiar line removed me from the moment:

“The little Lord Jesus, no crying he makes.”

Really? The baby Jesus didn’t cry? Whoever wrote this poem must have never flown in economy. There’s an implication that comes with this idea that the baby Jesus didn’t cry—that Jesus wasn’t totally human. And while I’m sure the author was just trying to complete the rhyme, it makes me wonder how it affects us when we forget the humanity of Jesus.

Credits go to Pastor Rene for capturing myself, Elizabeth, and Yolanda all trying to get the kids to smile, sing, and stop whacking each other with their shepherd’s crooks.

There’s a name for this doctrine: the hypostatic union, which describes the dual nature of Christ. It means Jesus was both fully God and fully man. 

This doctrine doesn’t simply make me feel better about myself in that, in my humanity I have put myself closer to Jesus. It means that He has intentionally, and at great cost to himself, put himself closer to me. 

It means that when I was highlighting scripts for the narrators an hour before the Christmas Pageant started, crying behind a music stand because my mom has a terrible disease I cannot heal, Jesus was close to me.

The truth is that Little Lord Jesus did not stay little. He grew. He became a man called the “man of sorrows” and one “well acquainted with grief” (Isaiah 53:3). In taking on humanity, Jesus did not save himself from suffering. He didn’t rescue himself from the cross, but went there willingly out of love for us. For you.

Glossy images of a soundly sleeping baby in a serene stable (it was most likely a cave) probably do not accurately depict the first Christmas, and thank God! The scene of the first Christmas was more than likely a mess, much like the world Jesus entered into to redeem. 

So to you who shed tears this year, remember Jesus, both in the manger and on the cross. The God-man who wept understands and stays near (Hebrews 4:15). He has given the ultimate gift. And one day, when we are fully in his embrace again, we won’t cry anymore (Revelation 21:4).