6 Sep | Eliana Update
In support of
Eliana Rivera
View Support Registry
Eliana Rivera
Prayer requests for this morning and the days ahead:
- In just a few hours, the same OR team that originally placed Eliana’s dialysis catheter is scheduled to come to her bedside and remove it. A lot has happened to get to this point, and I’ll share more of that in the reflection section below. The plan is to do it right here in her room rather than take her back to the OR. She will need to remain relatively calm and still while they remove it and hold pressure afterward. If for some reason they cannot safely do that bedside, the OR remains the contingency. Just to be transparent, Shar and I have a tremendous amount of trepidation about any procedure involving Eliana right now. Her body has not always responded predictably to procedures during this hospitalization, and some things that were expected to be relatively straightforward became emergent very quickly. I know this procedure is considered comparatively simple, but so were some of the others before everything changed, and that history is hard for us to separate from what is happening this morning. So we are praying very specifically for an easy, uneventful procedure. Given everything her vocal cords have already been through, we desperately want to avoid another intubation. Please pray that she is peaceful and cooperative, that her body tolerates the procedure beautifully, that there are no unexpected complications, and that the catheter comes out safely at her bedside.
- Please continue praying for her pancreas and glucose regulation. Her insulin requirements continue to decrease, which is incredibly encouraging. Right now, the main insulin they are continuing to monitor and adjust is her Lantus, which she receives every 24 hours. As her glucose remains more stable, they have continued reducing that dose and watching carefully to see how her body responds. Please pray that her glucose remains stable as the Lantus continues to come down and that her pancreas keeps demonstrating an increasing ability to regulate things on its own. We will still need an endocrinology plan when we leave the hospital, but we are praying boldly for continued pancreatic healing and eventually complete independence from insulin.
- Please pray for her nutrition. She has been completely off tube feeds since early Friday morning and has been eating orally like she hasn’t missed a beat. She has tolerated it incredibly well without vomiting or an upset stomach. The plan is to remove the feeding tube this morning as well. Please pray that she continues eating, drinking and tolerating everything beautifully, and that another piece of medical equipment she no longer needs can leave her body.
- Please continue praying for her voice and swallowing. The ENT evaluations remain generally reassuring from a structural standpoint, but her voice has still not returned. We are praying that as her entire body strengthens, her vocal cord function strengthens with it. Pray that the beautiful voice that carries so much of Eliana’s personality comes back completely.
- Please pray for everything that comes next physically, neurologically, psychologically and emotionally. There will almost certainly be significant outpatient rehabilitation: physical therapy, occupational therapy, speech therapy, neuropsychology, renal follow-up, endocrinology and whatever else her teams determine she needs. We are not asking simply for Eliana to become who she was before this. None of us moves backward through life that way. We are praying that God continues healing her and that she becomes stronger, more resilient and more fully herself as she moves forward into whatever life He has ahead of her.
- Finally, please pray that the conversation we were able to have yesterday about going home actually becomes the reality next week. The fact that we are even having that conversation is amazing to us. Today marks exactly four weeks since Eliana woke up excited to get dressed for church and attend the baptism class she had been looking forward to, only to wake with an upset stomach instead, and from that ordinary morning everything descended into a living hell that became our reality for the next four weeks. If Eliana continues progressing the way she has been, they believe discharge could potentially happen around the middle of this coming week. Please pray for continued healing, continued strength, and no new complications or significant setbacks. Pray that her kidneys keep recovering, her blood pressure and glucose remain stable, her nutrition continues going well, her physical progress continues, and that everything keeps moving in the direction it has been moving so that this conversation about going home becomes the reality.
Random Reflections from Yesterday: (This is long, so please skip, unless you have absolutely nothing else to do.)
Yesterday was different.
For the first time in almost a month, I think I can say without qualification that it was a truly wonderful day.
Strangely, one of the things I had to fight was the instinct not to say that too loudly. This experience has unfortunately trained me to be suspicious of good news. So many times something improved and something else went wrong. One number looked better while another became concerning. We would celebrate some small milestone and then find ourselves dealing with another complication. Somewhere along the way I developed this instinct that if I allowed myself to become too optimistic, somehow I was tempting the next catastrophe.
When I started seeing everything moving in the right direction yesterday morning, there was actually something inside me saying, This is a jinx. This cannot really be happening.
But there is no such thing as a jinx. Calling something good does not make tomorrow worse, and refusing to celebrate today’s mercy does not protect me from tomorrow’s suffering. The same commitment to truth that required me to call horrible things horrible over the last month requires me to call good things good when they happen.
Yesterday was really, really good.
The night before, sometime around 2:30 in the morning, they came in for one of Eliana’s routine checks and found that her glucose was a little low. There was a time when something like that would have immediately meant another medical intervention. Instead, Eliana ate some applesauce and drank some of her thickened strawberry lemonade. They checked her again roughly 15 minutes later and her glucose was fine. She ate something, drank something, her body responded, and then she went back to sleep.
Amazing.
We both slept until around 7:30, about five uninterrupted hours for both of us, which is the first time in a month that both of us have slept that long uninterrupted. I woke up and the sun was coming up, and then more ordinary things happened. People texted me. Eliana told me she had to pee. I helped her get up and walked alongside her to the bathroom. She went on her own. I stood beside her while she washed her hands, and then I walked with her back to bed.
Things that would have been impossible for her to do a week ago are beginning to become ordinary again.
Then the labs came back.
For the first time in almost a month, her BUN and creatinine both went down without dialysis doing the work for her. That distinction is enormous. Those numbers have gone down before, but they went down because dialysis was filtering her blood. After her most recent intermittent dialysis session, we expected the BUN and creatinine to slowly rise again until either another dialysis session became necessary or her kidneys demonstrated that they could increasingly do the work themselves.
Yesterday morning, they reversed direction on their own.
Her kidneys are not healed; they are healing. For the first time, we have compelling evidence that they are increasingly taking back their native filtration function.
At the same time, her hemoglobin has been leveling out and her platelets are increasing again. For most of this illness, it seems like we have always had some version of good news accompanied by something else we needed to worry about. Yesterday, for the first time, so many of these major markers looked good together.
I immediately reached out to my buddy Sam, who is a physician and has walked through some very significant moments of this with me, including being there the night Eliana peed for the first time. He looked at the numbers and also confirmed that they’re looking better.
Something shifted in me.
Shar and I have unfortunately learned more about HUS than we ever wanted to know. I would never pretend that makes us physicians or researchers. It doesn’t. But after living beside this disease every hour of every day, you begin developing a kind of embodied understanding of it. You learn the numbers and which ones matter in which contexts. You learn trajectory. You learn what a number means after dialysis versus what that same number means without dialysis. You learn your daughter. Over time you develop heuristics and intuition from everything you have seen and experienced.
Yesterday morning, for perhaps the first time in this entire experience, that intuition wasn’t screaming that something was wrong. It was telling me this was good.
Then nephrology came by.
Kidney doctors are not reckless people. They are incredibly deliberate. They have watched Eliana carefully, followed the data and discussed her case together. Yesterday they told us that if Eliana continues on the trajectory she is currently on, they do not anticipate her needing dialysis again.
That eventually led to another conversation that was also difficult for me to process: the dialysis catheter in her neck could come out.
The plan is for that to happen this morning, Sunday. In just a few hours, the same OR team that originally placed that catheter is scheduled to come to Eliana’s bedside and remove it.
I don’t know how to adequately explain what that means to Shar and me.
That catheter was placed in the OR during Eliana’s first crash. We were not standing there watching it happen. While the team was placing the catheter, her oxygen and blood pressure suddenly plummeted. They had to respond emergently and intubate her. That was the first time we were confronted with the horrifying reality that we could actually lose our daughter.
Then, two days later on Sunday morning, came the second and even more catastrophic crash. That was the one we were there for. That was the one where she was moments from arresting, when I made the call to bring my family to the hospital so we could say our final goodbyes. Even then, we continued encouraging her to fight, pleading with her to keep fighting, while at the same time believing that her end was near.
Those were two separate events, and I never want the story to collapse them into one. The first happened in the OR while the dialysis catheter was being placed. The second happened two days later, with us there, when she crashed again and we thought we could lose her.
And now, several weeks later, on this Sunday morning, the same OR team that placed that catheter during the first terrifying event is scheduled to come into her room and remove it because of how her kidneys are recovering and because nephrology believes that, if she continues on this trajectory, they do not anticipate her needing dialysis again.
It is hard to comprehend the distance between those moments.
The feeding situation has undergone almost the same reversal.
Only a few nights ago, I was distraught because her body simply would not tolerate the feeds. She was vomiting. Nutrition is absolutely critical to her recovery, and we didn’t understand exactly what was happening. Was it her stomach, the volume, continuous feeding, the tube itself, her pancreatitis, or some combination of everything?
For reasons I cannot entirely explain, the wee hours of the morning have been some of the hardest hours throughout this entire experience. Midnight through five in the morning has contained so much fear, exhaustion, prayer and suffering for us. There is nothing mystical about that observation. Human beings are supposed to be sleeping during those hours, and when you are instead awake, depleted, afraid and watching your child suffer, those hours can feel endless.
Then they stopped continuously feeding her through those hours. Her stomach settled. She passed enough of the swallow study to be cleared for Level 3 consistencies, even though she is still not safe with thinner liquids, and then this little girl began eating orally like she hadn’t missed a beat.
Applesauce, yogurt, thickened drinks and other things most of us consume without giving them a second thought have become glorious sustenance to her. Yesterday she started eating in something resembling meals again: breakfast, lunch, food and a drink together. Again, spectacularly ordinary things.
Her stomach has tolerated it.
She has now been completely off tube feeds since early Friday morning. The medical team understandably likes the feeding tube because it creates a controlled variable. They themselves have not characterized it that way, but anyone with mediocre critical thinking skills understands that this is effectively the case. They can know exactly how many calories she receives and exactly how much fluid goes into her. Shar and I (but it’s really just Shar. I think all of you know I bring no value here.) have been willing to work with every variable involved in allowing her to eat normally if it can be done safely.
Eliana has demonstrated that she wants to eat, that she can eat within the restrictions she has been given, and that she is tolerating it. This morning, Sunday, the plan is to remove the feeding tube.
Not long ago, we were preparing ourselves for the very real possibility that our daughter would leave this hospital dependent upon a feeding tube.
Now we are talking about taking it out this morning.
Her pancreas is moving in the right direction too. Her glucose still fluctuates, her pancreas is not fully healed, and we will still need endocrinology involved in her transition home. But her insulin requirements continue decreasing. Right now, Lantus every 24 hours is the main insulin variable they are continuing to control and adjust. As her glucose has become more stable, they have continued reducing that dose and watching how her body responds.
That is another form of healing we are watching in real time.
Not healed. Healing.
Then there is her voice.
ENT previously attempted a laryngoscopy, but it was short-lived because Eliana was gagging throughout it. What they were able to see did not reveal major structural damage requiring immediate intervention. They subsequently performed an ultrasound. That was similarly reassuring overall, although there was an equivocal finding of reduced movement in her left vocal cord.
At this point, the working explanation remains severe deconditioning.
And severe is an appropriate word.
This little girl has lost an extraordinary amount of muscle. Vocal function isn’t merely two little cords working in isolation. Voice requires an entire coordinated system involving breathing, pressure, posture, core strength, neuromuscular coordination, swallowing and all the structures involved in producing sound.
There is something else I am trying to be careful about as all of this begins moving in the direction of healing.
I do not want the ending of this chapter to rewrite my memory of the middle of it.
That is an easy thing for the mind to do. Once you know someone survived, the danger can begin to feel less dangerous in retrospect. Once kidneys begin recovering, kidney recovery can start to feel inevitable. Once a child begins walking and eating again, it becomes easier to look backward and think, of course she was eventually going to get here.
I don’t want to do that.
Not because I need to keep reliving the horror or convince anybody how sick my daughter was. I don’t. I want to remember it truthfully.
There are population-level statistics about HUS that are genuinely encouraging. Those are what I was reading. Those are what I was really dependent on, banking on, and placing my faith in to minimize what was happening before me. Most children survive, and many recover very well. I am profoundly grateful that those things are true. But population-level probability was never the same thing as a guarantee about the seven-year-old lying in front of us, particularly once her disease became as severe and multisystem as it did.
Eliana was not simply a child with HUS waiting for the usual recovery curve to play itself out. She developed kidney failure requiring dialysis, neurological involvement and seizures, pancreatitis, respiratory failure, profound deconditioning, and twice entered catastrophic physiologic crashes. Not every child represented in the reassuring side of the statistics experiences that course. She had moved into the severe end of this disease, into the very kind of clinical territory from which its worst outcomes come.
And even saying that is not meant as a defense of how frightened we were. I don’t need to defend it.
It is simply important to me that healing be remembered as healing rather than inevitability.
Her kidneys are recovering now. That does not mean they were always certain to recover. Her neurological function has returned in extraordinary ways. That does not mean we always knew what it would look like. She is eating, walking, interacting and becoming more herself every day. None of that changes what was unknown when we were standing inside those moments.
The uncertainty belonged to the story too.
So I want to receive what is happening now with enormous gratitude without allowing today’s outcome to flatten yesterday’s reality. I want to remember how dark it actually was, not because I intend to live there forever, but because otherwise I will misunderstand the mercy of what I am seeing now.
Psalm 77 says:
“I will remember the deeds of the LORD;
yes, I will remember your wonders of old.
I will ponder all your work,
and meditate on your mighty deeds.”
yes, I will remember your wonders of old.
I will ponder all your work,
and meditate on your mighty deeds.”
Psalm 77:11–12
I think that is part of what I am trying to do here. I want to remember the whole way. I want to remember what happened accurately enough that, years from now, healing does not make the suffering seem inevitable and distance does not make the danger seem smaller than it was.
Because remembering the darkness truthfully is part of remembering the beautiful thing God has done here.
For weeks we watched HUS create something like a vicious cycle. One system failed, that failure required an intervention, and sometimes that intervention or the critical illness itself affected another system. Kidney failure required dialysis. Respiratory failure required intubation. Critical illness produced immobility. Immobility produced profound deconditioning. Intubation and deconditioning affected swallowing and voice. Feeding difficulties contributed to vomiting and poor sleep, and poor sleep meant less energy for rehabilitation.
Not every problem was HUS directly attacking another organ. Some were consequences of the consequences.
But I am beginning to wonder whether we are now watching that cycle reverse.
Maybe there is a virtuous cycle beginning to form. She sleeps, which gives her energy. With energy she sits upright, stands and walks. She eats, which gives her body resources to rebuild. She isn’t vomiting, which allows her to sleep better and maintain nutrition. She moves and eats, which allows her to get stronger. And perhaps somewhere inside that virtuous cycle, her voice begins to strengthen too.
That’s what we’re praying for: a new song.
And this time I mean that almost literally. I want that beautiful voice back, the voice that carries so much of who Eliana is.
But with all this being said, even in the middle of all this incredible news, there still remains a lostness within me.
I can still remember exactly how Eliana used to run. This is particularly vivid to me because of the work that both Shar and I do with speed development. We both notice movement. We both notice stride efficiency. I can still picture her beautiful stride. Watching her run reminds me of watching the beauty of a 400-meter runner.
She doesn’t have that stride today.
Maybe someday she will. I desperately hope she will. But if someone tells me, “Don’t worry, she’ll definitely get all of that back,” my response is simply that you don’t know that.
Neither do I.
Acknowledging that is not a crisis of faith. It is truthfulness.
Healing isn’t necessarily binary. It can be complete or partial. It can unfold over weeks, months or years. There may be things we discover only after Eliana reaches new levels of functioning and begins attempting things she cannot attempt today. There may be psychological, emotional, neurological and physical implications of this that none of us yet understands.
We’re praying for complete healing, but we haven’t been promised that everything will look exactly the way it did before.
Actually, I’m trying to learn how to meet Eliana where she is now, knowing there will be a new Eliana, without trying to fit her back into the old Eliana.
None of us moves backward through life that way. We are all becoming. Sometimes we become stronger. Sometimes life wounds us. Sometimes our choices change us, and sometimes suffering changes us. There is no simple positivism in which every human life moves perpetually upward.
Eliana will not become the August 8 version of herself again.
She will become the Eliana who lived through this.
My prayer is that God heals everything that has been injured and carries this little girl forward into something stronger and fuller than either of us can presently imagine.
But I also recognize that there may be losses we carry.
I know something about that already.
My dad died earlier this year. I had an amazing father, and there is tremendous beauty in what he gave me and how he taught me to live. But he isn’t here. That hole does not get filled on this side of heaven.
Eliana is here, so this is obviously profoundly different. But what happened to her cannot be unhappened, and I don’t yet understand all of its implications.
So when someone says, “Don’t think about that,” I don’t agree.
I will think about it. I will meditate on it and ponder it. I will grieve what deserves grieving, watch my daughter carefully, ask questions, advocate for her, pray for her and intercede for her for the rest of my life.
What I will try not to do is become enslaved to the thought process of, “Why did this happen?”
I can give uncertainty its proper weight without giving it dominion over me.
And that brings me to something else I’ve been wrestling with.
Science does not scare me. Empirical evidence does not scare me. Medicine does not scare my theology.
Most of my professional life involves systems, technology, aviation, implementation, execution, risk, dependencies, problem solving and trying to understand incredibly complex systems well enough to make them work. I am not a PhD or a medical researcher. I am a practitioner. But I believe deeply in evidence, methodology, disciplined reasoning and trying to understand how things actually work.
I don’t experience any of that as somehow existing apart from God.
I believe God is a God of order. It makes perfect sense to me that human beings can observe His natural world and discover something today that we didn’t understand yesterday. That is ingenuity and discovery, and as a Christian, I believe those capacities themselves come from being image bearers.
Look at the people who have cared for my daughter and think about what it took for them to become capable of doing this: undergraduate work, medical school, residency, fellowship, specialization, and years and years of disciplined study and practice. Then all of those people, with all of those different disciplines, somehow converged around one seven-year-old girl and used what they had learned to help keep her alive.
That is amazing to me.
I don’t have to choose between thanking them and thanking God, and I don’t have to choose between medicine and Jesus. I don’t believe they occupy competing territories.
At the same time, I have experienced the finitude of medicine in a way I never had before.
We can put my daughter’s brain inside an extraordinarily sophisticated MRI machine and produce images that would have been unimaginable for most of human history. Then a brilliant neurologist can examine those images and her clinical course, look me in the eye and honestly say that there are still things we cannot know or predict.
That’s not a criticism of medicine. That humility actually makes me trust them more.
It simply reminds me that human knowledge has boundaries.
And I want to be careful here, because I am not making a God-of-the-gaps argument. I’m not saying science cannot explain this particular thing, therefore Jesus must have done it.
Tell me every mechanism. Show me every pathway. Explain renal recovery to me. Explain pancreatic recovery. Explain endothelial repair and glucose metabolism. Explain exactly how applesauce raises my daughter’s blood sugar.
I want to know all of it. Kind of.
I don’t believe human ingenuity exists apart from God. I don’t believe biology exists apart from God. I don’t believe medicine exists apart from God, and I don’t believe the mechanisms through which Eliana is healing exist apart from God.
You may believe differently, and that’s alright.
I can only testify to what I have experienced. I can tell you what happened, what the doctors said, what the numbers showed, and what happened inside my own mind, heart and soul.
But I also refuse to be dishonest about my own experience simply because one might interpret it naturalistically.
I have never felt so isolated in my life, and somehow in that same isolation I have never experienced the nearness of my God like this.
I have been angry with Him. I have been frustrated. I have pleaded. I have been terrified. My emotions have been capricious and my faith has sometimes felt futile.
But I have never stopped believing that He exists and that He knows me more than I know myself.
Through this experience, I believe I have encountered His presence in ways I never had before.
I learned afterward about that first crash in the OR, when her oxygen and blood pressure collapsed and the team had to intubate her and stabilize her. Two days later, I was physically there for the second crash. I watched what was happening around her as she came moments from arresting. I made the call to bring my family to the hospital so we could say our final goodbyes. And even then, we kept encouraging her to fight and pleading with her to keep fighting, while believing her end was near.
And somehow she survived.
I was also there in the wee hours of the morning when she peed for the first time after her kidneys had produced essentially nothing. Sam, a physician and a very good one, was standing there with me. We understood that there was physiology involved, and all we could do was praise God.
I can only testify to what I have experienced, and what I have experienced is the mercy of Jesus.
Why did He spare my daughter?
I don’t know. Honestly, I don’t think it’s my business to know.
There is something I need to make crystal clear. None of this happened because my faith was strong enough. None of this happened because Shar and I are special. None of this happened because our family somehow deserved it. None of this happened because more people prayed for Eliana than prayed for another child, and none of this happened because Eliana fought harder than somebody who didn’t survive.
We brought nothing to the table that put God in our debt. Nothing.
There is another father somewhere who prayed as desperately as I did and didn’t receive the outcome he begged for. There is another mother who believed just as deeply and another child who fought just as hard.
I cannot explain why their story went one direction and ours has gone another.
I will not insult their suffering by pretending I can.
All I know is what happened here.
We asked God for mercy, and mercy came.
And that brings me back to a Psalm that has been with me through so much of this.
Psalm 40 says:
“I have told the glad news of deliverance
in the great congregation;
behold, I have not restrained my lips,
as you know, O LORD.
in the great congregation;
behold, I have not restrained my lips,
as you know, O LORD.
I have not hidden your deliverance within my heart;
I have spoken of your faithfulness and your salvation;
I have not concealed your steadfast love and your faithfulness
from the great congregation.
I have spoken of your faithfulness and your salvation;
I have not concealed your steadfast love and your faithfulness
from the great congregation.
As for you, O LORD, you will not restrain
your mercy from me;
your steadfast love and your faithfulness will
ever preserve me!”
your mercy from me;
your steadfast love and your faithfulness will
ever preserve me!”
Psalm 40:9–11
That is where I find myself this morning.
“I have not hidden your deliverance within my heart.”
If I have been willing to tell you about the darkness, then I am going to tell you about the deliverance. If I have been willing to tell you about my anger, fear, lostness and suffering, then I will not restrain my lips when God has shown us mercy.
I will speak of His faithfulness. I will speak of His salvation. I will speak of His steadfast love.
Not because I am trying to make you believe something, but because I would be dishonest about my own story if I concealed what I believe God has done.
Yesterday, I sent a video to a few of the guys who have walked alongside me very closely through all of this. The video showed some of Eliana’s journey from the beginning of this nightmare to where we were yesterday, ending with something that would have been almost unimaginable not long ago: Eliana walking unassisted.
I ended that video with the words of Job:
“Though he slay me, yet will I hope in him.”
That verse mattered to me because I chose it before yesterday morning’s kidney numbers, before nephrology told us that if she continues on this trajectory they do not anticipate her needing dialysis again, and before we knew that both her dialysis catheter and feeding tube could be coming out this morning.
In other words, the hope came before I knew what the next outcome would be.
And that matters to me because I don’t want yesterday’s good news to become the evidence that God was good all along.
The cross already settled that for me.
When I didn’t know what the next set of labs would bring, God was good. When my daughter was critically ill and I could not understand why any of this was happening, God was good. Now, when I can barely comprehend how much healing I am watching, God is good. And if another difficult day comes, He will still be good.
The circumstances have changed dramatically.
The object of my hope has not.
Though I have some trepidation this morning for this upcoming procedure, I am generally happy.
Not merely some abstract theological definition of joy. I mean happy. Deeply happy.
Maybe I have expensed all my tears because I’m not sitting here crying as I write this. There is simply this profound happiness inside me that I don’t really have language for. Joy, happiness, gratitude, relief, wonder, positive affect, whatever words we use, none of them feels big enough.
Because I get to sit next to my daughter.
I get to touch her, hold her, embrace her and kiss her. Every day a little more of her personality emerges, and she loves me. Not because someone tells her to. She communicates it out of her own volition, and I get to receive the love of my daughter again.
It is glorious.
And none of this has suddenly made me some spiritually impressive person.
I’m still pathetically broken. I’m still sinful and still the half-hearted creature C.S. Lewis talks about, far too easily pleased. And unfortunately, I’m still the guy who belts out the “prone to wander” stanza of Come Thou Fount because I’m pretty sure it was written just for me.
That is the hymn I keep coming back to:
“Prone to wander…”
I hate that about myself. I wish I didn’t take good things and try to turn them into ultimate things. I wish I didn’t manufacture idols. I ask God to tear them down, and then I wake up the next morning and discover that apparently my heart has started rebuilding them.
But it’s ridiculous. I’m ridiculous. And somehow He remains gracious to me. He remains gracious to you.
Isn’t that wild?
I don’t know what your life looks like. That’s what mine looks like.
I’m not leaving this hospital holier than everybody else because my daughter survived. I am leaving it increasingly astonished that Jesus continues to love someone as prone to wander as me.
“We love because he first loved us.”
When Eliana couldn’t talk to me, I loved her. When she couldn’t hug me, I loved her. When she couldn’t do anything for me, I loved her. When she was unconscious, I loved her. Before she could return anything to me, I was beside her.
And now she reaches toward me. She shows me affection. She loves me, and I get to receive it.
Something about experiencing that as a father has made grace less abstract to me. Not because my fatherhood perfectly explains God’s love. It doesn’t. But I understand something differently now about love that moves first.
He loved us first.
And because He loved us first, we can love Him and we can love one another.
Someone could call what I’ve experienced coincidence, probability, biology, psychology, trauma or luck.
I can only tell you that I have remained present through this. I have thought critically. I have asked hard questions. I have studied the numbers, challenged assumptions, listened to physicians and changed my mind when evidence required it.
Alongside all of that, with my own eyes, mind, heart, spirit and soul, I believe I have witnessed the mercy of God toward my daughter.
But Jesus had a say in this. Our King. Our Creator. Our Sustainer.
I don’t know why He has been this merciful to us. I don’t know what Eliana’s life is ultimately going to look like, and I don’t want to place some ridiculous burden on her that because she survived she now has to accomplish something extraordinary enough to justify being spared.
She doesn’t. She gets to live. My daughter is here. That is enough.
So this morning I am not whispering the good news because I am afraid of jinxing what comes next.
There is no jinx.
When the news was horrible, I told you it was horrible. When I was scared, I told you I was scared. When I was angry, I told you I was angry. When I was lost, I told you I was lost. When I didn’t understand what God was doing, I told you I didn’t understand.
So when the news is wonderful, I’m going to tell you that too.
Yesterday was wonderful.
Psalm 40 says, “I have not hidden your deliverance within my heart.”
Neither will I.
I will proclaim the glad news of deliverance because that is honestly what I believe I have witnessed.
And the future remains uncertain.
There is an enormous amount of life ahead of us. There will be rehabilitation, appointments and questions. There may be losses we have not completely understood yet. Eventually we have to figure out what returning to work looks like, what returning to life looks like. Our boys have lived through their own version of this. Our entire family has to integrate back into a life that continued moving while ours seemed to stop.
We aren’t going back to August 8.
We’re going forward.
We’re going to need people who have suffered before us. We’re going to need your wisdom. We’re going to need the church. We’re going to need people willing to celebrate with us and people willing to sit with us when something hurts.
Perhaps someday something we have learned in this darkness will allow us to sit beside one of you.
Iron sharpens iron. We bear one another’s burdens. We build one another up. We receive from one another and give to one another.
None of us gets the glory for being the one who had it figured out.
God does.
I don’t have to diminish today’s goodness to protect myself from tomorrow’s suffering, and I don’t have to deny tomorrow’s uncertainty in order to rejoice in today’s goodness.
I have not hidden His deliverance within my heart.
Thank you, Jesus. Be with us today.
Emilio Rivera
4 days ago
Comments
Amy McNan 4 days ago
Amanda Thrall 4 days ago
L W 3 days ago
Anne-Marie Wurzel 3 days ago
Denise VanEssen 3 days ago
Roisin Stukas 3 days ago
Heather Lee 2 days ago