Category: Hope

Father Knows Best

winding-road.jpg 

I’ve been waiting for the question that hasn’t come. But it will, I’m sure of it. 

“Scott, aren’t you even a tad jealous that Kevin Everett will likely retrieve all his bodily functions and mobility after suffering a potentially grave spinal cord injury?”

This is going to sound weird, I know, but Kevin should be jealous of me.  Hear me out.  Kevin Everett is the tight end for the Buffalo Bills who sustained a near-crippling injury while making a tackle in Sunday’s NFL season opener.  He launched at his opponent, driving his helmet into the player’s chest and immediately crumpled to the ground.  Early indications were that he would be paralyzed for life, his career in football over in seconds.  Twenty-four hours later we were hearing he was voluntarily moving his arms and legs and his doctors were hopeful even of a full recovery and return to normal life.

Two roads, he and I, with two patently different outcomes.

When I blew a gust of relieved air with the rest of America, I steeled my mind on the truth of God’s sovereignty.  One man’s miracle is another man’s blessing.  Sure, the enemy was there with his typical suggestions: “…it’s not fair, is it, Scott?  You didn’t get the same break, did you?  God is so cruel!  I’ve been listening to your prayers for your own healing for almost 26 years now…and what?  Nothing.  Still stuck in that wheelchair!  And you’re a, what, preacher of the Gospel?  You’d think your Father would look out for you…” 

But I sit here, clacking away at these keys, a blessed man!

(Nice try, Slewfoot.)

The fact I am in a wheelchair does not mean I have not been healed.  Oh, I have, believe me!  My paralysis is a pathway to glory and I am resting in the knowledge that my Maker has set me apart for a privileged season in His sun.  He’s given me a break.  You want to know Me?  Your brokenness is the essential way.  The same Apostle who said his own suffering was working for him an eternal weight of glory, said that in the life to come some will shine like the sun, some like the moon and others like the stars in glory.  I’m after the former.

I am thrilled for Mr. Everett but I wouldn’t trade my journey for anything.  Years ago I picked up a copy of Jerry Bridges’ Trusting God Even When Life Hurts and found in its pages the answer to my soul’s questions and even now, years later, find myself referring to its basic tenets time and again.  Mr. Bridges says that God is sovereign, meaning He can do whatever He wants because He is God.  He says He is also all-wise and His children can draw comfort from the fact that while God can do whatever He wants, He knows exactly what He is doing.  Everything He does has purpose.  The third truth pouring from its pages is that God is all-loving.  Ah, this is the most comforting unguent of all!  While God does as He chooses, He always does it in view of His own glory, and always, always, for our eternal good.

This is the God of my life and I am determined to follow Him through every vale of sorrow, every mile of struggle, and every season of loss and despair.  I can do this because the broken road is the blessed road and my Savior walks it with me.  Had feeling been restored to me on October 3, 1981 (the day “after”) and the next 26 years been “normal” for me, I have some doubt whether I would have known the Lord as intimately as I do tonight.  Perhaps yes, perhaps no.  I leave even that to His sovereignty.

I praise the God who sits on the circle of the earth, over those who walk and those who don’t.  Over those who succumb to disease and those who get well.  Over those who serve Him and those who shake their fists at Him.  Makes no difference.  He is Lord.

One last thing.  There was a time when I could sit down (well, of course I’d be sitting!) and write song after song.  Interesting that it was in the early years of my disability and I probably wrote three dozen tunes.  One of the songs that flowed out of my belly pretty much sums up how I feel about these matters.  Mind you, the lyrics were written over 25 years ago and they show some youth, but they are just as real for me today as they were in the early 80’s.  To the praise of His glorious grace!  

HE KNOWS WHAT’S BEST FOR ME

I know I can’t walk around and at times it gets me down
But He knows and I’m kept by Jesus’ love
There’s so many things I’d like to do
Run a race and win one too
But He knows and that’s enough for me 

He knows how much my spirit can stand
He’s so concerned for my good
He is so wise and He hears all my cries
He knows what’s best for me

Sometimes it’s hard to pray when He seems so far away
But He’s there and He’s listening to my heart
He reaches down in love
From His heavenly throne above
‘Cause He knows what I need the very most

And when my life is done
And my crown of life is won
Then I’ll know my pain was worth it all…

It’s my guess that the question I’m still waiting for won’t come after you read this.  Oh, one more thing.  Please don’t think I am being haughty and patting myself on the back.  The truest thing I know is this: none of this comes from me.  Only God could take a broken man’s life and give it meaning and rhyme. 

And Father knows best.

15:20

“And he got up and went to his father. But while he was still far away, his father saw him and was moved with pity for him and went quickly and took him in his arms and gave him a kiss.”

–First century parable from the lips of Jesus

Long about noon on Saturday a father and son will meet in a giant bear hug far from the horizon that once separated them.  And Mom will be there too, just the right touch needed to make a three-corded strand.  Perceptive onlookers might catch a glimpse of something arcane and otherworldly in this simple tapestry: a family wrapped, cinched and secured in the keeping power of the Strong-Armed One.  I’d call that an unbreakable family bond.

The son is, at long last, coming home.  Gone will be the rags and fetters of the far country and, though the memories of depravity and hellishness will linger, the air will be gloriously cleared of the demons that enslaved and harrassed. 

I noticed a subtle nuance about that story this afternoon.  I found in my Bible, the NASB’s translation of Luke 15:32 to be, “this brother of yours was dead and has begun to live…”  The translators took the verb anazoo and made the distinction in it’s aorist tense that a process or action has begun that, if it continues, will certainly end in a completed action or effect. 

That’s pretty technical sounding so let me dumb it down for you and me.  When I have told others of our son’s return, I (a) do not refer to Graham as a “prodigal” because he no longer wears that moniker by the grace of our Lord, and (b) advise them not to expect our boy to exude an ethereal glow and matching halo.  The boy has begun to breathe again the new air of the liberty by which Christ has set him free.  He is just now beginning to lay hold of that for which Christ has taken hold of him. 

Like me (and you), he will not have “arrived”.  He might break our hearts again.  (I sure wish there was a verse 33 in that chapter so we could see how it plays out six weeks, six months or six years from the banquet!)  He might revert.  I pray not, for the scriptural phrase “a dog returning to its vomit” is not such a good thing.  It’s deadly, in fact. 

All we have is today. 

And 15:20.

And verse 32.

And that’s got Mom and me giddy from the word go.

And go we will.  To meet our son on a hillside of grace, restoration, reconciliation and…

JUBILEE!      

Finally, let me end with this captivating story found in Philip Yancey’s book, What’s So Amazing About Grace?  The details might not mirror ours exactly and while it is about a young girl rather than a teenaged boy, you’ll see why I’ve done it.

A young girl grows up on a cherry orchard just above Traverse City, Michigan. Her parents, a bit old- fashioned, tend to overreact to her nose ring, the music she listens to, and the length of her skirts. They ground her a few times, and she seethes inside. “I hate you!” she screams at her father when he knocks on the door of her room after an argument, and that night she acts on a plan she has mentally rehearsed scores of times. She runs away.

She has visited Detroit only once before, on a bus trip with her church youth group to watch the Tigers play. Because newspapers in Traverse City report in lurid detail the gangs, the drugs, and the violence in downtown Detroit, she concludes that is probably the last place her parents will look for her. California, maybe, or Florida, but not Detroit.

Her second day there she meets a man who drives the biggest car she’s ever seen. He offers her a ride, buys her lunch, arranges a place for her to stay. He gives her some pills that make her feel better than she’s ever felt before. She was right all along, she decides: her parents were keeping her from all the fun.

The good life continues for a month, two months, a year. The man with the big car–she calls him “Boss”– teaches her a few things that men like. She lives in a penthouse, and orders room service whenever she wants. Occasionally she thinks about the folks back home, but their lives now seem so boring and provincial that she can hardly believe she grew up there.

She has a brief scare when she sees her picture printed on the back of a milk carton with the headline “Have you seen this child?” But by now she has blond hair, and with all the makeup and body-piercing jewelry she wears, nobody would mistake her for a child. Besides, most of her friends are runaways, and nobody squeals in Detroit.

After a year the first sallow signs of illness appear, and it amazes her how fast the boss turns mean. “These days, we can’t mess around,” he growls, and before she knows it she’s out on the street without a penny to her name. When winter blows in she finds herself sleeping on metal grates outside the big department stores. “Sleeping” is the wrong word–a teenage girl at night in down town Detroit can never relax her guard. Dark bands circle her eyes. Her cough worsens. Continue reading 15:20