Let it be

What an unexpected last three weeks.

I guess you can never really know what to expect in the near future. But nowhere in my wildest imagination would I have come up with this storyline.

The burn wasn’t that big a deal to me. I mean, it hurt. But I knew it would heal in a few days. I didn’t give it another thought.

Those few days came and went and my mother/sisters-in-law convinced me to get it looked at. (They threw out the words ‘staph infection.’ Yeah, that did it.)

First thing the next morning (then six days out) I’m in the burn unit at the hospital with Michelle (sister-in-law). They called me back to take my vitals before the doctor came in. The nurse took one look at it and was not happy with me. She began giving me a stern motherly lecture as she took my blood pressure.

“I know, I know,” I confessed. “I kinda lost track of how long it had been with my trip and the holidays and all. And then someone yesterday said ‘staph infection’ and that scared me so – “

“Oh, I wouldn’t worry about a staph infection as much as sepsis,” she snapped at me as she shook her head disapprovingly.

My stomach dropped. “SEPSIS?” I looked at her aghast.

She glared back at me, “And sepsis is…” My eyes widened even more. “That’s right,” she continued. “Sepsis is…” she motioned for me to fill in the blank and leaned in for emphasis.

“Fatal,” I whispered, looking back at the infected mess on my leg.

“Mm-HM!” She clucked her tongue.

She rattled on about letting things go too long and how irresponsible it was, but I didn’t hear much else. I’ll never forget how that word felt in my mouth. Fatal. Just waiting something out could be fatal.

And from what I hear, this year’s flu is the same. And so is cancer. This whole waiting-it-out business isn’t always the right way to go. My doctor’s office has a sign in it that says IGNORE NOTHING. I guess I ignored it. Whoops.

Now here I sit in an uneasy calm before the next potential storm. I’ve had two surgeries, cadaver skin, my OWN skin graft, an infected graft site and a bad reaction to antibiotics. It’s the gift that keeps on giving.

I won’t describe what the burn or the donor site looks like, for those of you with weak stomachs out there. But I’ll tell you this much: At my last appointment on Monday, all the nurses and doctors oohed and ahhed at how beautifully the skin graft had taken. Then Brad said, with eyes as big as saucers, “Well, what does it look like when it DOESN’T take? Because THAT looks like HELL.” (Thanks, babe.)

So now we wait. No, let me rephrase that: We KEEP waiting. More antibiotics, another followup on the calendar, the doctor asking for a picture of the infected site today to see how it has responded to the second round of antibiotics. Hoping my body will finally befriend the medicine and they decide to work together on this project.

Like Haiti, like Israel, you’re probably going to hear about this incident more than once. Lots of lessons learned, you know.

But today, I want to talk about the importance of LET. (No, that’s not a typo. Hang with me.)

I LOVE to rest… when it’s my idea. But let me tell you, nothing makes me want to train for a marathon more than being told I need to stay off my feet.

And you know what? I can occasionally accept help on big projects. But when it comes to the basics of taking a shower, getting something from across the room or a glass of water from the kitchen, I do NOT want help. Suddenly I was filtering out what I really needed versus what I just wanted to keep from sounding high maintenance. Most women can relate to this.

(The guys reading this are thinking, “Are they CRAZY? I LOVE being waited on hand and foot when I’m sick!”)

Three weeks into this inconvenience, I’ve finally begun to grasp one of the lessons God has been pressing on my heart.

I must learn to let.

Let people help me. Let things play out. Let my body heal on its own time. Let go of the illusion of control. Let the Christmas decorations stay up. Let Brad go to Publix. Let Caroline make dinner. Let my blog go for week after week. (Painful, you guys.) To calm down, get out of the way, quit trying to fix something or force something through and just, as the great theologian Paul McCartney says, LET IT BE.

See, I did it backward (not surprisingly). I ignored a wound that needed to be tended to. And now that it just needs time, I want to push things along.

No, now is the time to let.

And the word that goes hand-in-hand with let is rest. Letting implies resting. Passivity. With all the time I spent waxing eloquent about carpeing the diem and living proactively, I forgot the rest factor.

The first two weeks, I really thought I was resting. I was sitting. Almost all the time. When I wasn’t sitting, I was lying down. My body was technically at rest.

But my mind was making up the difference, working overtime trying to figure out the logistics of my botched plan for January.

The mind and body are supposed to work together, you know? Somewhere along the way, my mind and body separated so dramatically it bewilders my therapist. And I think the reconnection of the two would make a huge difference in my health. (I’m working on it.)

LEG: We’ve got to REST. You heard what the doctor said. Calm the crap down and be still, will ya?

MIND: YOU be still. He told YOU to be still. I don’t have to be still. I’m very busy. In fact, I’m busier than ever, since YOU decided to just take some time off.

LEG: Oh yeah, time off. Just chillin’… with a third-degree burn and staples in my flesh. Look, we’re not going to get well if…

MIND: What’s this ‘we’ business? There’s nothing wrong with ME.

LEG: We’re a team. We’re supposed to work TOGETHER.

MIND: Whatever.

LEG: Okay, if you think we’re so separate, why did the doctor numb you too for our surgeries? He could have just numbed me and let you go crazy up there. He needed ALL of us to be still so he could do his work.

MIND: (Sigh.) What’s your point?

LEG: My point is you need to SIT DOWN, SHUT UP and REST, dammit. Or we’ll never get well. I know we don’t communicate very well but now is NOT the time to go rogue, okay? All hands on deck, so to speak.

HANDS: Did you say something?

LEG: Sorry. I was talking to somebody else.

In Luke 10:27, Jesus demands it all:

Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind.

Then, of course, there’s the whole metaphor of the Body of Christ in 1 Corinthians 12, about how all parts are important, all parts are needed. Not functioning as individual pieces but as a unit.

Here’s why it’s so important to grasp the concept of LETTING: Most of us really suck at letting God love us.

We’ll let Him save us. We’ll let Him help us. But my gosh, we just cannot stop trying to EARN it.

We love because He first loved us (1 John 4:19). That means, since we love, His love was already there FIRST. Or we would not be able to love at all.

You don’t earn that. You CAN’T earn that. No matter how much studying, praying, striving, serving, giving, worshiping you do, it can never even come close to deserving God’s perfect love.

So what’s a believer to do?

LET Him.

All I have to do is LET Him love me. Stop trying to earn it or work for it. Stop trying to push it away when I’m embarrassed and don’t deserve it. Stop trying to make it make sense in my tiny, frantic, restless, anxious mind.

Literally, all I have to do is get out of the way and just let Him love me. Can you imagine how different my life would look if I lived from that place? (Sigh.) It’s almost like He designed it that way.

This is the second January in three years that I’ve ended up completely helpless for weeks due to an injury. (Remember the back incident of 2016? Good times.) Maybe God wants me to start the year off with a firm reminder of the beautiful and holy LET.

Let God.

Whatever He wants. Whatever He does. Whatever He allows. However much He loves. Let Him.

The truth is, there’s nothing we can do to really stop it. But we CAN miss it.

Yesterday, my mind finally caught up with my body and rested. And I let it. It was a huge breakthrough. And I honestly at long last started to feel like I was actually healing.

Now, in the same way, I pray that God would help me to let Him. Do whatever He wants.

But to start, before anything else, I must let Him love me. And I must rest in that love.

The late, great Brennan Manning said,

I am convinced that on Judgment Day Jesus is going to ask us one question and one question only: Did you believe that I loved you?

I want to say, YES!

Yes, Lord, I did believe You loved me! And I let Your love spill out of me and get all over everyone around me! I didn’t seek love in all the wrong places! I didn’t waste time chasing man’s empty praise! I rested in Your love and let You love me as much and as hard as You wanted and gathered strength to do mighty things from that love! It was so much easier to love You and love others well when I was full of YOUR love! I believed that You loved me all the way down to my toenails! You loved me and everybody knew it!

Especially me!