His head aches, so I knead my fingertips on his scalp. He leans forward again, groaning, retching. I stroke his back, sweaty-from-pain beneath the blue hospital gown, "it's okay...it's okay...."
Gingerly leaning back against stacked pillows, he blinks up at me with luminous olive-green, blurred-sight eyes, "thank you, Mommy..."
I weep anew. That this suffering boy-man of my heart would see my fear-filled face and worry-shaking hands of care, with gratitude. That he instinctively pours forth gratitude, despite the suture-stitched space above his heart, and the brain-swelled agony of challenging his ventricles.
Fear’s grip is so tight, so consuming. Shaping me, conforming me, into the sharp corners of it’s prison.
There are moments of clarity; breaths of free air, that I gulp in greedily, and see with new eyes the limitless blue sky of trust and faith and grace.
And then.
And then he is wheeled away from us again, scarred, cut, stitched, bruised, for yet another procedure, another surgery.
I pray and beg.
I breath slow, intent against fear’s possession. Knowing not the outcome, there is gushing relief from God’s Presence, and Hope crowds out the hungry space of prison-fear.
For now.
For now, he rests fitfully before me, and there are two more sutured wounds, to make seven this week, and he is well; for now.
And fear is but a degree-of-fever away.
And Hope is here with us.
click here for more on 'TheCalebMiracle' -
part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, and A Freed Heart
