It is not for you to know
Time marches relentlessly on.
If I had to identify one primary difference between Arabella’s pregnancy and this pregnancy, it would be that.
With Arabella, it seemed like a long, slow, arduous trek towards delivery day. Time creeped by, the weeks between appointments seeming to stretch out in unending cycles of waiting.
This time, we seem to turn around and another month has passed. With two kids under four, the rhythms of preschool, and dance, and work, time races on. Tomorrow, the official start of my third trimester. The final stretch.
At dance on Monday, I was handed packets of recital information, final rehearsal dates, costume requirements. As I punched dates into my phone, I watched the next two months become compressed and I found myself catapulted into June. Moving. Waiting. Shiloh arriving. Yesterday at the local OB’s office, I scheduled out the remainder of my appointments here in Wenatchee. And all of this speeding toward the finish line has my throat tight and my chest pounding and my hand instinctively reaching down to feel the turns of my daughter while the simple plea echoes for the hundredth time of the day, “Please grow that ribcage.”
My ob yesterday, “that thoracic cavity measurement was a hard one last time wasn’t it? We’re hoping for growth like her sister’s next week!” Yes, yes that is exactly what we’re praying for.
This week a post in our facebook group for those walking with the realities of Ellis Van Creveld – a baby born premature still clothed in the same deadly, hopeless, incorrect diagnosis that Arabella was initially given, and so allowed to quietly breathe his last with mere minutes to his life, a correct diagnosis to only come after the fact. And the sharing of this grief evokes others to step up and share, to say yes, we know your grief. Stories of little warriors whose spirits could not overcome the limitations of their bodies. And I weep through each one, wondering if I’m about to join their ranks, and the precariousness of our situation stands out in bold relief and the prayer escapes again, “please grow that ribcage.”
And other posts in this group raise questions, and fears, and wonderings about the road ahead for not just Shiloh, but Arabella as well. With such a rare disorder, one shared by only a couple hundred others worldwide, it feels a bit like we’re groping around in the dark some of the time. And so our notebooks fill with questions to be asked at next appointments with Arabella, and I hug her a little tighter each day and wonder at the the miracle that she is.
And in the same moment I swell with gratefulness and hatred of this modern age we live in. Thankful for technology, for bypass machines and surgery techniques and echo cardiograms and breathing tubes and countless marvels of science that give my girls a fighting chance. Thankful for something silly like facebook that helps us to know good questions to ask, helps us prepare for and identify hurdles to come. But knowing also that all this information tends to mess with my mind and heart, tends to deceive me along with Eve way back in the garden, that I can be like God in my knowing. And if I can be like God in my knowing, that I can be like God in my controlling. And I watch my open hands clench up, and I worry and fear over tomorrows that are none of my business.
John Piper’s words, as I pound out my anxieties on the tread climber in the morning, come as a needed slap in the face. Reading from the beginning of Acts, “It is not for you to know times or seasons that the Father has fixed by his own authority.” Piper muses, why is it not for us to know? Because we could not handle this knowledge. As Jesus prepared to depart, the disciples asked Him about the kingdom, asked about the restoration – will we see this happen in our day how we hope to see it happen? “It is not for you to know.” Will I see the kingdom manifested in my daughter’s body? Will I see the healing I know is possible display itself in a miraculously expanded ribcage? In lungs that breathe deep, and a heart that beats strong despite its brokenness? I hear those words spoken gently to me, “it is not for you to know.”
Can I be honest with you? Those words leave me weary in the waiting. I want to cry back, but Jesus, if I knew I could prepare myself, I could be ready. I could somehow muster up the strength for the days to come. But before that prayer can fully escape my lips, Jesus’ next words come as a steadying crutch for my stumbling legs. “BUT you WILL receive power.”
There are so many possible outcomes in the next six months that I cannot see how I walk through. I cannot imagine holding my daughter as she breathes her last breath. I cannot imagine the possibility of being separated for perhaps months from daily life with my other daughters, as I fight with and beside and for Shiloh in the hospital. I cannot imagine sending one…or two…daughters back into open heart surgery, never certain to hear the beat of their hearts again. There are so many scenarios that make me just want to curl in a ball and stop the relentless march of the clock.
But I hear the one who sees me all weak and weary gently whisper again, It is not for you to know…BUT you WILL receive…
I flip open my bible in this 2am wrestling match, this battle to claim truth and rest in the all sufficient love and knowing of my Jesus, and it falls open to Deuteronomy and the wilderness days. And this verse, underlined in faith and experience, leaps off the page. “He knows your going through this great wilderness. These forty years the Lord your God has been with you. You have lacked nothing.“
The road ahead is not for me to know. BUT my Jesus knows. And I will receive that which I need on each day of this journey, be it months in the NICU or years of an ache for a child I never got to fully know.
And so day by swiftly passing day I come, a beggar well aware of my lack asking for grace for this day. Manna from heaven for this day. And trying so hard to release all of my tomorrows, and my daughters’ tomorrows, into His hands.
I have been reading your blog for probably more than a year now, and it blesses me so much. I have a difficult medical problem (pregnancy related), and can relate to so much of what you share! Your faith is so inspiring to me! Please keep writing. I’m praying for you and your precious baby girl!