maurius

I feel like I sometimes paint too bright a picture of my heart around here. Like I'm some kind of faith-filled warrior who can trust God through anything. Like there's always a lesson to be learned in every situation, a lesson from a loving God and so everything is okay. So maybe it'll shock you when I tell you that I'm angry today. I'm frustrated and disappointed and I'm actually just plain angry at God.

Maurius went into the operating room today. I was headed to a meeting in the office when I passed by his mama, Chantal, huddled with the nurses in the waiting area. I stopped to pray, one hand on her back, the other on Maurius' chubby foot, and then they went in through the heavy, sliding doors and I went on with my day.

Just a few minutes later, there was a flurry of activity and people being paged to OR Four, and when we turned on the camera in that room, we saw another huddle around Maurius, this one made up of surgeons and anesthetists and nurses and everyone was moving faster than they should if everything was okay. We stopped our meeting right then and there and sat in a circle and prayed to a God we've seen do miracles before. Truth be told, after what happened last week, I expected the same again. I expected to watch on the silent screen while the tension rolled out of shoulders and the crash cart rolled out of the room.

Except that's not what happened. Maurius is very sick. His lip is fixed, and he looks like a new baby, but that new baby is so awfully sick. The infant tubing for the new ventilator is held up somewhere a few miles away in customs, and the old ventilator just isn't precise enough, so we've had to roll a great, hulking anesthesia machine over from the OR just to breathe for him. None of us can see the light at the end of the tunnel right now, and it makes me so angry I just want to scream.

How is this fair? Why this kid? After all his mama's done, after all we've done, why on earth would this happen? And why doesn't God just step in like He did with O'Brien? Why is He waiting, off in the wings somewhere, while we watch this baby suffer?

I know this doesn't make me a good Christian, all this doubt. But I look at that little one with his lip all held together with steri strips and I want to shake my fist at the sky and demand to know why it had to come at such a price. Why, just once this year, something couldn't go right instead of so horribly wrong.

Why can't something just go right for one of these babies?