I will often reflect on an event, especially a difficult situation, and look to see how God was working. It’s helpful for me to even get parabolic, even to break down the roles of an interaction and imagine who was God in the parabolic version of the situation. I learned a lot about the character of God on Wednesday when Helena broke her finger and needed medical attention.
Our little first grader was in the cafeteria about to eat her lunch. While getting onto the bench of the table she lost her balance and a pillar in the room awkwardly broke her fall when she caught her left pinky finger on the way down. It hurt. She went to the nurse for a cold pack and her finger started to swell big time. It was also quite bent. Helena told me that it looked like she had two thumbs on her left hand.
Martha picked her up and took her to the E.R. with Lily in tow. Six hours later they were ready to leave the waiting room (what a drag!), and when waiting for the doc to see her I got the call to bring up some dinner and relieve my wife. It turned out to be a fracture right above where her finger extends past her palm. She needed a cast, and to get the cast on they needed to manipulate the “new thumb.”
By 1am, the doctors were ready to put the cast on. They needed to give Helena local anesthesia by giving her several little shots into her knuckle (not a six year old’s favorite moment, as you can imagine). She was scared and it hurt (even though they sprayed her hand with “the cold stuff”) and I sat next to her and told her it was going to be okay, to breathe through it, that I was with her, and that it’s almost over. She made it, showing quite a bit of courage. She even got a pink cast (that matches all her clothes).
I think of God as the healer. We’re broken and God is the Great Physician who is going to come and heal. When healing comes, I don’t want a shot and I don’t want a cast. I want a miracle!
That night I learned a deeper sense of what God’s love as a Parent is. The miraculous healer was even understood by the people Jesus was talking to. When he scandalously referred to God as Father-even OUR FATHER-it was considered pretty much heresy.
God is not merely the delivery mechanism for a quick fix out of hard situations. I have learned this time and again. God doesn’t respond to our suffering with “ok, I’ll just make it better right now” all the time. Jesus helped bring God much closer than the stranger doctor who comes in at 1 in the morning and sticks us with needles. Jesus brought God so close as our Father who is close to us, who loves us, who suffers alongside us, and sees us through even the hardest of times. Especially in the hard times, rather than seeing myself just a patient in some cosmic doctor’s waiting room, I want to be God’s child.
“God is not merely the delivery mechanism for a quick fix out of hard situations.” Real patience is something that, put obviously, requires a lot of time to learn. It’s a difficult lesson, but it’s worth it. Delayed gratification always seems the way to go. I rarely look back at a situation and say, “I was too patient.” So often, I look back and say, “I went too fast.”