I stared at the woman in the mirror looking back at me for what felt like a small eternity. Long enough for her features to begin to look foreign and unfamiliar. Only jolted back to reality by the alarm I had set the night before. “It’s 6:00 AM!” my phone screamed. But I had been up for hours.
I mindlessly ran a brush through my freshly showered hair. I was getting myself together to head up to the intensive care unit one last time. We had been there all week. I could feel the lion chasing me. The hot breath of grief went down my neck. The brush in my hand suddenly felt like it weighed fifty pounds.
My daddy was dying and there was nothing I could do about it. It felt like we were sitting in a little car moving in slow motion towards a head-on collision with an eighteen-wheeler. No matter how desperately I pulled up on the emergency break, we were nose to nose with this thing that was going to crush us.
My knees buckled and my eyelids broke under the pressure, giving way to the hot tears behind them. They hit the ground with the conviction of a muggy summer rain. I turned my grief-warped face towards heaven and screamed with all of my might, “Please! Stop adding to my ministries.”
Before I could finish my plea, almost as if the Holy Spirit took my face in His hands and through His own weeping nudged, “You mean my ministries?”
The ever so gentle yet direct reminder was enough to stop my heaving in its tracks at least for the moment. “Whoa,” I exhaled as my brow furrowed in thought. Suddenly I was profoundly aware of my humanness. A clay jar.
My brow furrowed deeper. My daddy’s dying did not feel like a treasure or a mercy. Second Corinthians 4:1; 7 says,
Therefore, since we have this ministry, as we received mercy, we do not lose heart … But we have this treasure in earthen vessels, so that the surpassing greatness of the power will be of God and not from ourselves…
Whatever the complete and most radical opposite of treasure is – it felt like that.
My spirit and my flesh were at all-out war with each other. My flesh wanted to kick and scream and thrash and bang her fists on the floor like a child who didn’t get what she wanted at the cash register. But in my spirit, I knew. He was right, as He is. This was not my ministry. It was His, and he had chosen me to carry it for Him.
And so, knees shaking and lip quivering; hard pressed on every side, but not crushed; perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not abandoned; struck down, but not destroyed, I stood up like it was my honor to be entrusted with this momentary affliction.
Because, it was my honor.
I helped the little girl on the grocery store floor to her feet and I gave her the hug I knew she needed. And then I said, “Okay, Lord. Here I am. If you say it is a mercy, it must be a mercy.”
My mind wandered to John 13:7 as Jesus was washing His disciples’ feet He said to Peter, “What I do you do not realize now, but you will understand hereafter.” And you know what? Choosing to stand up was not a one-off deal, but rather choosing it every moment. Over and over. Two months later I still do not understand why my 53-year-old, charismatic, once-in-a-lifetime, kind, give you the shirt off his back, girl daddy extraordinaire had to leave his wife, his daughters, and his grandbabies.
But I do know this to be true: what He calls us to He equips us for. And so, I will gladly carry this mercy, His ministry wherever it is He calls.
Therefore we do not lose heart, but though our outer man is decaying, yet our inner man is being renewed day by day. For momentary, light affliction is producing for us an eternal weight of glory far beyond all comparison, while we look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen; for the things which are seen are temporal, but the things which are not seen are eternal (2 Corinthians 4:16-18).
