Overcoming Busy

What Matters Most – Perspective

June 2, 2011 by Marci

Welcome to the What Matters Most series. Today, one of my favorite writers, Annie from SisterWisdom.com, shares her “perspective” on what matters most to her.

Four years ago today I was stretched across the bed in my parents’ room, holding my Mom’s wrinkled hand and telling her it was okay to die. Upstairs my little girl, not quite a year old, was asleep. For the last month she and I had been down at my parents’ house, keeping vigil with my Dad and my sister, watching Mom age about a year every day as her long fight with breast cancer ended. I’d be sitting in front of the high chair, spooning mashed-up something into Mara’s mouth, while the hospice nurse helped Mom shuffle by behind me from bed to couch or back again. Little toothless Mara would wave and jabber, Mom would manage a smile, and on we would go.

But tonight was the last night. We knew. It was the early, dark morning of June 2, 2007. Mom’s blood pressure was dropping. Her breath got more and more shallow. Her skin was yellow. Her hands were wrinkled, her mouth stretched tight like an old woman’s, her eyes closed, but she was hanging on and I knew it was for us.

We leaned a little closer, held her hands, kissed her cheeks, and told her it was okay. It was time, and we would be okay. She could go on home.

Soon after, she did.

The next day I went shopping with my sister for a black maternity dress. I was 4 months pregnant with my second. When he came into the world that November, screaming and squalling, restless and colicky, it was as if he embodied all the emotional turmoil in my own heart. For the first time in my life, my Mom wasn’t there when I needed her. And for the first time in my life, it seemed like God wasn’t there, either.

Oh, perspective.

When I lost Mom, all the walls of my little religious house fell down around my ears, and everything I thought I knew about God was shattered. So I let loose, day after day, with a howl from deep in my own heart: Why? Why my Mom? Why not heal her?

When Robbie was born, I decided that I’d better take care of things myself. A God who couldn’t be trusted to heal my Mom couldn’t be trusted to take care of me and my husband and my little girl and my newborn son.

It took me a few months to figure out that, as much as I might not understand or like what God chose, He could still do a better job taking care of us than I could.

Two weeks ago I got the news that my Grandfather, my Mom’s Dad, my last living grandparent, had died. While my aunts and uncles and cousins were at his visitation, I was in the hospital giving birth to our fourth child, a little girl who cried for about 2 minutes and then settled into the most peaceful, accommodating, laid-back baby I’ve ever been around. I can’t say that’s a direct reflection of my inner state, because when we came home to the hospital it was to one minor disaster after another. Our 3 older kids all got strep throat. Our air conditioner broke. Our washing machine broke. Big storms came through and we lost power for a day and a half. I got a nice case of mastitis and high fever and shakes to go along with it. Then, with Lily barely a week old, Joe had to go get chest x-rays because of severe chest and back pain.

So I’m sitting in bed, nursing the baby, feeling sorry for myself. I’ve doled out antibiotics. Joe is next to me, sleeping. I’m sweating because the AC isn’t fixed yet and I’m imagining what might go wrong next. Our car will break down. A tree will fall on our roof. The possibilities are endless…

As I work my way into a blues-song-worthy mess, a single image comes to my mind. It’s the hospital in Joplin, Missouri, just a few hours from my home. The hospital with windows blown out. The hospital where, maybe, a new Mom was holding a new baby when that tornado came through. The hospital in the town where so many people lost every single thing that ever mattered.

And here I am, upset because my AC is broken.

Oh, perspective.

God never answered my question about Mom, but He shouldn’t have. It didn’t deserve an answer. When we demand that God answer our “Why,” we are demanding that He give us His perspective. We feel justified in the asking, but it’s the same thing Adam and Eve were after with that apple: “Surely you will be wise like God.” We want to be wise like God, not because we want to know Him, but because we want to be able to handle things without Him. Adam and Eve coveted his knowledge, his understanding, his perspective, because it sounded like power and independence to them. They longed to see the world as He did. When we demand answers to our questions, we stand in the same place. “Open our eyes, and let us be like You,” we are saying, because then we won’t need You, and we will feel safer.

So what matters most to me right now is the perspective I do have, because it changes everything. I don’t want to be like God. That means I don’t get to know or understand everything. I don’t see the plan ahead of time. I don’t get the reasons for the pain. But I also don’t have to run the world, heal the wounded, grieve over every lost sinner on the face of the earth. My perspective is necessarily limited because I am limited.

How dare I demand that God grant me some of His greatness, some of His power, some of His ability, some of His view, when I am not willing to shoulder the pain, the grief, the responsibility that go with it? He knows that we are unable for such things. Our meager little whys only affirm it. If we had any wisdom, we wouldn’t be asking why. We would be asking for trust.

By the way, the next day the AC guy showed up promptly at 8 in the morning and fixed the problem, the belt for the washing machine came in, the doctor called to say Joe just had a virus, our car kept running, and no trees fell on our house.

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Annie Mueller is a freelance writer and mom of 4 who blogs about marriage, parenting, personal growth, faith, simplicity, and other adventures at www.SisterWisdom.com.

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Have you ever been too busy to gain the proper perspective of your situation? Is God trying to get you to trust him with what matters most?

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