Another Week in the Hospital

I am writing tonight from the 8th floor of Brenner’s Children’s Hospital in Winston-Salem. We’ve been down this road before (today was Luke’s 4th surgery in our journey of his colon disease). Everything went as planned today. The first day is always the hardest on Luke. He is very sad. As the week progresses, he will become more himself.

There is not much to report tonight. As Tom Petty says, “The waiting is the hardest part.” That is what we will be doing for the next 5-7 days. Waiting for a bowel movement. Not sure yet what we will do if that doesn’t happen.

I will have more to write about as the week progresses. I will leave you with this one nugget though. In my sermon yesterday at Grace Foothills, I gave an example of not believing the gospel when we are not showing loving-kindness (hesed in the Hebrew) to a waitress or someone in customer service when they are not serving us all that well. Wouldn’t you know it, that as we were checking into the Ronald McDonald House last night, the weekend manager was extremely condescending and rude to me (very atypical of the Ronald McDonald House, by the way). How did I respond? Let’s just say that for a moment, I was not believing the gospel for myself. I was not kind to this woman. What went down in my heart reminded me of this:

I had forgotten God’s pervasive love and grace for me. Worst of all, my kids saw my response. What was it that the Apostle Paul said? “Who will rescue me from this body of death? Thanks be to God who delivers me through Jesus Christ our Lord!” (Romans 7: 24-25).

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