Rescue Me

“I’m sorry, I can’t hear you right now!,” I said, yelling into the phone, “A fire truck just pulled up next to us and the siren is on!!”  It was the first week of December and we had landed in an airport less than an hour before to look for housing in Kansas where we would be moving to in just over a month.  I was standing in a busy street next to our rental car that suddenly stopped working trying to direct oncoming cars to go around us.  Nick was inside the car trying to get it to go into neutral so we could at least pull to the side of the road and be safe.  Eden and Ezra were standing on the sidewalk nearby, the former trying not to worry and the latter having a good ol’ time.  And Salem was safe and warm at home in California with my parents. 

I had been on hold with our rental car company for at least 45 minutes shivering in the cold.  As the time crawled on and on and my teeth chattered harder and harder, I kept praying desperately that God would rescue us.  The worst part of the entire thing was our inability to make the situation better.  “God, please help someone pick up the phone!  Please get us out of this quickly!”  Finally the on-hold music stopped and I heard someone answer.  I was so relieved that the process to get help was finally going to begin.  I had just started to explain our helpless situation to the representative when I suddenly heard sirens.  A fire truck and a police car loudly announced their arrival to rescue through blazing sirens and bright flashing lights. 

The year 2020 has been one long stretch of feeling unsafe, uncomfortable, and uncertain with a desperate longing for rescue.  Besides the global pandemic and the many issues that our country has faced this year, our family has had our share of trials.  On the eve of 2020, we found out that baby #4 was not doing well and we wondered whether our baby would live.  As the year marched on into spring with the new normal of quarantining and social distancing, I began to suffer many health issues that included bilateral chronic pain throughout my body, which left me wondering for many months what was wrong with me. And then during the summer God began to lead and speak to us in His own way, and we recognized that He was preparing us to move…again.  As fall approached, His plans became clearer and clearer until Nick accepted a new pastoral position in Kansas City, KS.  And now it is winter.  We are moving in about 2 weeks, our housing in Kansas is not completely secured, Nick’s precious grandfather recently passed away due to COVID-19, and as I write this, a man who was like a mentor and uncle to all of my childhood friends and I is dying.  This year began with death and it is ending in death.  It has been one of the most difficult years of my life.  I have cried many tears, felt many worries, expressed much anger, and experienced overwhelming amounts of stress. In many of the situations I have faced, I felt that I would’ve done anything to be rescued immediately.

I remember talking to my good friend, Esther, about my many woes and she sympathetically exclaimed, “You sound like Job from the Bible!”  Although Job’s disasters were incomparable to mine, I did relate in some ways.  Like him, I’d lost a child, I’d lost my health, and I am about to lose my home in California.  But the beautiful thing about Job’s story is that through the process of being stuck in the loss, unanswered questions, and inability to rescue himself, God did something in Job.  Job says to God at the end of the book, “My ears had heard of you but now my eyes have seen you,” Job 42:5.  The relationship between Job and God was not the same.  His trials made him face his beliefs and question whether they were really true.  His friends challenged him with false ideas about himself and God, which he could’ve chosen to believe.  But when it all resolved, Job now knew God even clearer than before.  Knowing God had moved from knowledge to experience. God rescued Job from a superficial relationship with Him. 

In this I also resonate with Job.  As I have gone from one loss to another without having my questions answered or getting out of my hardships quickly, I have started to understand that I will not be able to know things that I can’t possibly know.  But on the other hand, I can know God.  GOD!  The God who will give me my child back in eternity and restore my health to perfection. I can know the God who knows exactly where I will live in Kansas and every single person I will know there.  I can know the God who made himself a poor human, lived a hard life, and died to save me.  I can know the God who can do anything, the God who knows everything. 

When Jesus was followed by some of John’s disciples in John chapter 1, He asked them what they wanted.  They asked where he was staying and Jesus invited them to come there and they spent the afternoon with Him.  Jesus could’ve just told the disciples where He was staying, but instead, He invited them into an experience with Him to know Him deeper.  This has been true for me this year.  I stopped putting my focus on what I couldn’t know.  Why did my baby die, why have I been diagnosed with fibromyalgia, why are we leaving again?  Instead, I started focusing on simply knowing Jesus.  And every time I did that, He invited me to experience every struggle with Him.  I experienced His strength when I was weak.  I experienced his faithfulness when I was in doubt.  I experienced His joy when I was in sorrow.  The knowledge I had of God being ever present, compassionate, patient, good, and loving, I experienced first hand.  In these experiences, I came to know Him deeper than I ever had before.  He took the hardships that I thought were tying me down and used them to break the chains that separated me from Him.  I was no longer waiting in fear, but rather in peace and confidence because I knew who was with me.  

After the fire truck and police car arrived, things got worse before they got better.  Our rental company said that they could send someone there in about an hour and a half.  When the chief fire fighter heard about this, he promptly marched over to me and began yelling into the phone.  “Excuse me, sir!” he bellowed, “It seems to me that you have your priorities wrong.  You seem to care more about your car than this family!  You need to get yourselves over here now!!”

Eventually, love won out.  The fire chief called the fire departments’ own tow truck to come get our car and the driver volunteered to take the car back to the car rental for us.  The tallest fireman who had been making friends with Ezra suggested that perhaps we could wait at the fire station just to get out of the cold.  After talking it over with the others, they decided on an even better idea.  The fire chief announced, “I’m just going to take them back to the car rental myself in the fire truck!”  Eden, Ezra, and I giggled as we settled into our seats in the fire truck, our eyes scanning all of the lights, buttons, and gear.  Nick was excitedly filming our adventure while sitting in the passenger seat.  “And what’s your name, sir?” Nick asked as he pointed his camera to the fire chief.  “Well, I can’t tell you that, because I might get into trouble,” he replied matter-of-factly.  When we took off, the fire chief turned the siren on and said to us, “you guys are about to do something that most people don’t get to do.  Break laws!!” Then he sounded the horn over and over again while we sped through red light after red light. 

Back at the car rental, the company of course wanted to save their reputation so they upgraded us to a 2021 BMW SUV.  Nick happily drove the nicest car he ever had in his life though he struggled with the speed limit like never before. The kids were happy to be back on track with our house hunt, and I was just happy to be warm.  Somehow I felt that that experience was a reminder of what I’d learned this year.  That even though life on earth will be full of loss, pain, confusion, and doubt, and will often get worse before it gets better, if we go through it with Him, we will know Him better than ever before.  He will save us. 

Just as I no longer worried when the fire department came and started taking our rescue into their own hands, I stop worrying when I experience my troubles with God and allow Him to rescue me.  And eventually He will rescue us forever from our world of trouble.  Ultimately, we experience, love to the rescue.