Daddy Won't Let You Fall!

Elijah & his 13 balloons for being brave
during the X-rays.

The past couple of months have been a blur. It's hard to believe that not even three months have gone by since Elijah's third surgery. He cruised right through it and is doing so well now. In fact, we joke that we're experiencing Elijah 3.0 now that we're on this side of his third surgery. He has more energy and more zeal for life than ever before. And he certainly talks more than he ever has. In fact, at dinner tonight he told me that he has some money (which he doesn't), and that he keeps it on the counter (which it's not) and that he'd like to buy some fruit with it (which he doesn't eat), and that he would like to put it in a big, tall bank someday (which I actually couldn't argue with). On most week days, he's chatting with me right up until I leave for work, and I can still hear his little voice sweetly ringing in my ears for most of my morning commute. I'm always amazed (and sometimes amused) when God uses little things that Elijah says to shed light on my relationship with Him. The one that has ministered to me most recently and most vividly came during our stay in the hospital for his most recent surgery. After he came out of the cardiac intensive care unit and was moved to the stepdown unit, Sarah and I were able to move out of the Ronald McDonald House and into his room with him. Every morning would start with a blood draw as early as 4 a.m., immediately followed by a trip to the radiology department for a chest X-ray. Seeing your  toddler startled awake at 4 a.m. by a needle stick in the arm and then rolling him downstairs and placing him on a hard table under bright lights and restraining him while a big, scary machine hovers over him is not (not, not, not) a pleasurable experience. While the machine and the lights were scary to him, it was the seemingly unstable nature of that table, having no side rails, that was the hardest for him to handle. The first time we placed him on that table, he clung to my arm so tightly that I thought we'd never un-pry him; the only thing I could think to tell him was that, "Daddy won't let you fall." I didn't even think he could hear me above his screaming, but I said it repeatedly without realizing it in the midst of the chaos of that first X-ray. The next morning, as we placed him on his mommy's lap in the wheelchair and started out of his room, his little voice made a declaration that I'll never forget: "Daddy won't let you fall! Daddy won't let you fall!" Over the next couple of days, those words became Elijah's battle cry as we rolled him out of his room, onto the elevator, down the long corridor to the radiology department and into the exam room. The urgency in his voice would intensify the closer we got to the scary table, until his proclamation was drowned by screams of protest. But something started to happen. With each passing day, he grew more and more brave and less and less afraid of the process. By the end of his stay, he would confidently declare that "Daddy won't let you fall!" just before I would lift him out of his mommy's lap and carry him to the table. Once on the table, he would hold my hands tighter than he ever did before his surgery, and he wouldn't let go the entire time. He would then calmly wait for me to pick him up and place him back in his mom's lap so that he could begin petitioning for his well-deserved reward--a colorful mylar balloon.

It will be a long time before my son understands how much of an impact his words had on me during those seven days. They carried me through some of the hardest and most intense moments of that hospital stay. For each of his three surgeries, there were moments when both Sarah and I felt that our world had completely crashed down, and that there was absolutely no light at the end of the tunnel. These moments mostly came when Elijah would take turns for the worse and send us and his care team scrambling. I'll never forget one of those moments in January 2009, days after his second surgery. We were living in the stepdown unit with Elijah and providing a lot of his care. Something was wrong with his digestive system, and he was struggling to keep his formula down, which was keeping us in the hospital longer than we wanted to be. No one had any answers, and we were at the end of our ropes. Feeling trapped, defeated and deflated, we both stepped out of his room and just a few steps outside of the main entrance of the unit so that none of the nurses could see us. Then we collapsed to the floor, and with our heads in our hands and tears streaming down our faces, we cried almost as hard as we did the day that we got his diagnosis just three months earlier. Little did I know that I needed the words that Elijah would use to comfort himself less than three years later: "Daddy won't let you fall!" All throughout the Bible, God reminds His children that He's in control no matter what our circumstances are. And more importantly, we can trust Him to hold us through those circumstances. During those daily trips to X-ray, Elijah became fully convinced that his dad would NOT let him fall off that table. He was so convinced that he used that promise--the very words that I first proclaimed to him--to prepare himself for what was coming. He was still scared, he still cried most days, but he was willing to go through it because he knew that his dad made a promise to him. When I think about the promises that God makes to us, His children, I can't help but to utter the same reminder to myself: "Daddy won't let you fall." On this side of Heaven, we're going to experience some pretty uncomfortable--and sometimes downright scary--things, but God's promise to us saved by His grace is this--He will not let us fall.

"For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor any other created thing, will be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord." -Romans 8:38-39