“Mommy? What is going on with her eyes? That’s creepy!”
I paused the video we were watching from Mayo Clinic and answered my daughter’s inquisitive aversion. “When you have vertigo and feel like you are spinning, your eyes jump like that because they are trying to find a focal point to help you get your balance.” It was the best answer I could give a child, knowing she couldn’t understand the complexities of the brain. My nausea had subsided from the last attempt I made to help heal this untimely bout of vertigo, so I grabbed my computer with it’s step-by-step instructions, and headed to the bedroom. “Ok Maddie. You can come with me while I try to get these crystals in my ears back to where they belong. Then I won’t feel like I’m dizzy all the time.”
The next morning, I felt well enough to be a driver for my daughter’s field trip to a local nursing home. Her teacher walked up to me and began to giggle, “Shannon! You won’t believe what your daughter said this morning. I had to write this one down in my memory book. Maddie came into class and her friend H____ had on a very pretty dress for our field trip. Maddie looked at her and said ‘You know H__, my mom has rocks in her head and it makes her not see well and she dressed me like this today’.” Trying to explain how she came up with that was futile. We both laughed…while I secretly glanced over and wondered what was wrong with the way she was dressed.
As I sat reading a very familiar passage of my Bible this morning, I realized I must do the same thing with my heavenly Father more than I realize. I look at life, listen to its message, ask Him questions, and listen to His response. Then somewhere in my self-centered, myopic, infantile view of life, out pops conclusions about God and His ways.
Yet, the complexities of the ways of God He summarized for all of us in Isaiah 55:8-9 NLΓÇ£My thoughts are nothing like your thoughts,ΓÇ¥ says the LORD. ΓÇ£And my ways are far beyond anything you could imagine. For just as the heavens are higher than the earth, so my ways are higher than your ways and my thoughts higher than your thoughts.”
I looked back down at the verses in John 11 I’ve read countless times. Yet this morning, they drew me to linger and echoed their words to my attention.
“…some said, “This man healed a blind man. Why couldn’t he keep Lazarus from dying?” And again, Jesus was deeply troubled.”
John 11:37-38
That’s where I can get tripped up in my walk with the Lord. I am very aware that in God’s abilities there are no impossibilities. I am intimately acquainted with His power and have been an eye witness of His miracles. But then, just as my daughter’s filter of understanding produced a childlike conclusion, I will wonder why the Lord didn’t intervene or act in a certain way. Especially when I know there were heart cries and prayers sent for His help, just like Martha and Mary had when their brother was dying.
But I see the connection between the people knowing what Jesus could do, their questioning Him in His ways with Lazarus, and then His response of being deeply troubled. I don’t want to trouble the Lord, make Him sigh, or hear Him whisper, “Shannon, haven’t I told you, that if you will just believe…trust Me…you will see the glory of God?” (John 11:40)
He works so individually and intimately with each of us. It’s never “one size fits all” except in the availability of salvation and His sanctifying work of grace. I closed my Bible, but not my eyes (I still have vertigo. My daughter is dressed just fine).
But in my heart, I readjusted my focus on all the ways the Lord has been faithful in the past. Then instead of trying to get my balance by staring at the present spinning of circumstances, the eyes of my heart looked at Jesus and said “I believe You will get glory from this, even though the situation seems impossible.”
And then it happened. My spiritual vertigo stopped. The nausea from my worrying mind dissipated. And I realized my pajamas were inside out.
