strange God

It's hard to know just what to write right now. I feel like I've lived seven lifetimes over the course of this past week, and I don't know how to communicate that in black and white.

When I left home, we had just spent several weeks studying love with the youth group kids. We learned what love looks like in the world, and we learned what it means for God to be love. Little did I know how much those lessons would come to mean.

Here on the ward on the Africa Mercy, the charge nurses pick a "word of the week" for us to focus on. I found out yesterday that the words were chosen some time ago, which makes it all the more significant that last week's word was love, and this week's is joy.

Last week was one of the hardest of my nursing career. I realize more and more that, despite my best efforts to stay open and neutral, I came to Liberia with some pretty strong expectations of what this hospital experience would be like. I expected smiling faces; cleft lips being closed and club feet being straightened. I expected, if not an easy time, at least a less intense time. I expected to leave the moral and ethical issues of the PICU at home. After all, the motto of Mercy Ships is Hope and Healing, not Hope, Healing, and Helping Small Boys Slip Quietly Into the Arms of Jesus.

I was, of course, wrong. I had to come face to face with my own fallibility and weakness during the long, dark nights last week. I sat there next to Sadie’s and Benjamin’s beds and I just felt so inadequate. Knowing that God had called me to pour out my soul on these boys, but faced with the stark reality that all the love I could ever give, whether in prayer or in tangible, medical intervention, was going to fall short of making them whole again. I couldn't understand why a God who claims to be Love would let it happen. I searched the pages of Scripture backwards and forwards, frantically reaching for a toehold in the swirling mess of anger and heartbreak.

And so I learned something about God last week (perhaps not for the first time, although it felt so utterly new when I came across it again). He is Love, this much I had already accepted. But alongside His love, bound up inextricably in His character, He is also a strange God. He says so Himself. My ways are nothing like your ways. Your grandest thoughts don’t compare to mine. How high would you say the sky is? That’s a good measure of how much bigger my plans are. (Isaiah 55:9) He’s simply not bound by my expectations or my limited understanding of His heart. And He whispers to me again and again from that heart. I knew Benjamin and Sadie. Every hair on their heads. Every move they made, every day of their short lives, I knew. After all, I'm the one who wove them together; I'm the one who decided the number of their days. I wrote down each one of those days, recorded them faithfully in my book before one of them ever came to be. (Psalm 139)

In the wake of tragedy and uncertainty and feelings of failure, I am comforted by that knowledge. And I am ready for joy to come back to the wards.