Thanksgiving Praise --- From the Hospital

I received this email from a friend, and I offer this "guest-post" as a reminder of what it REALLY means to be thankful:


Hi Tom. Happy Thanskgiving again! It's been a long day today as my mother continues her recovery and is in quite a bit of pain from the internal bleeding from the IR procedure, but I can give you the following praise to pass along in your blog.

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On Monday night I was terrified. If the procedure for opening my mom's arteries in her right leg failed, the surgeons were considering other life-changing options [none of which my mom wanted to consider, and none that I wanted to consider for her, especially for someone of her age]. After leaving the hospital really late, I returned to my house to get ready for the next day and, more importantly, to pray, like I had never prayed before. Now, I could have ignored the inner urge from the Holy Spirit and gone about the 100s of things that I left unattended over the past few days (I was in my mother's hospital room nearly 24/7 during the last 7 days), but I didn't. I opened my Bible, for the first time in quite a while, and knelt by the bedside, reading before I prayed.

The first piece of paper that slipped out of my Bible was a copy of a sermon from 2002 (interestingly enough, that was the year of my mother's 1st major bypass surgery...which remained relatively successful until the past year, and definitely until the last week). The sermon focused on trust -- Is God worth trusting? When your life (or the life of a loved one) is threatened, where do you look?

The first part of the sermon focused on Elijah, and the second part concentrated on Peter. This is where I will direct quote from the sermon:

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Peter gets out of the boat. This is an incredible thing [for several reasons].

The Sea of Galilee is known for its deadly storms. It's narrow, but it's very long and become very wavy in a bad storm. If you were a fisherman and you lived your life fishing on that lake, you probably had friends die when those sudden storms came up.

The disciples are out there on the lake, by themselves, and they see Jesus, or a figure, walking on the water and the very first thing they think is, it's a ghost. You wonder why. Had they ever seen a ghost before? No. But, for some reason, they don't know who this is, and they think there is a ghost walking on the water. Jesus makes it clear that it's Him. And Peter says, "If it is You, then ask me to come to You across the water." -- a very, very trusting thing to do. But it shows something about Peter's heart. Peter loved to go wherever Jesus was. Later when Jesus is seen on the shore, Peter simply jumps out of the boat and swims to the shore. Not willing to wait until the boat makes it to the shore because his heart is to see Jesus. He wants Jesus. He wants to be where Jesus is. He wants everything that Jesus has to offer.

So, he gets out of the boat. The first step was the hard one. Imagine, your foot's going over the edge and you're about to stand on water. This isn't a typical event. Especially the first time. This is one of those miracles that was particularly hard because there was no precedent for this. There was precedent for splitting seas and splitting rivers, but walking along watching the water on both sides of you, or even just standing on the water -- this was a first. And so, he takes that first step. After that it was easy. He kept taking steps -- second step, third step, fourth step. But, the first step was the hard one. Do you think he turned around and said, "Andrew, have a rope ready."?

And then Peter makes the mistake that is easy for all of us to make, he suddenly realizes what an amazing thing this is: he is standing on the Sea of Galilee in the middle of a storm! He then makes the classic mistake, which is all so easy to make: he takes his eyes off of Jesus and he looks at the circumstances -- [Peter to himself] Here I am, violating gravity. Here I am in a storm. What am I doing out here?

Peter takes his eyes off of Jesus, he looks at the storm and his immediate response is he starts to fall. Jesus is immediately at his side, and pulls him up. He doesn't let Peter go down the first time or a second time to teach him a good lesson. Jesus doesn't wave good-bye to the disciple that doubted. Jesus pulls him up. But, Jesus reminds him, when you're in the middle of a storm and you're walking on the water, don't take your eyes off of Me.

That's always the temptation. We're surrounded by the storms all the time. Sometimes the calm in our life is only the eye of the hurricane. And the bottom line is if we take our eyes off of Jesus, we will get blown away; we will go down. The only security, the only saftey we have is to keep our gaze constantly fixed on Jesus Himself.

Peter loved Jesus. Peter wanted Jesus. Peter risked everything and ultimately gave everything for Jesus. After Pentecost, Peter is a great spirit-filled evangelist who, in Rome, was willing to lay down this life for the One Who loved him first, because Peter learned the lesson: never, ever, ever take your eyes off of Jesus. No matter what situation or circumstance is clamoring for attention, look to Jesus. No matter how much the storm is raging, look to Jesus. Because only there can we be safe. When Jesus says "without Me you can do nothing", that is exactly what He meant.
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Wow! Fairly powerful sermon and exactly what I needed to read, but the real blessing came when I opened the Bible directly to Acts 9:32-43. The first 4 verses focused on Peter healing Aeneas at Lydda and the remaining verses focused on Peter raising Dorcas at Joppa.

The next thought that occurred to me was that if Peter, who learned the lesson of keeping his eyes on Jesus in the middle of a storm, could go on (in Jesus name and power) to actually heal someone who had been paralyzed for 8 years, certainly I could focus through prayer on this same Jesus and believe Him for His healing power to reach my mother in a hospital. And, He did. Despite all the unfavorable circumstances, my mother's age, the nature of the artery failure, the fact that the first surgery on the preceding Friday failed, the doubting surgeons -- Jesus overcame! He worked through the talents and skills of the hospital's leading interventional radiologist and did something that the vascular surgeons didn't think was possible. PRAISE GOD!!!

Now, I'm not going to say that mom's ready to run a marathon (she has a long recovery road ahead of her with physical therapy), but God did intervene in exactly the way I prayed that night, and in the next morning as I knelt before her hospital bed.

So, while this isn't the Thanksgiving I expected (with a dinner table full of different foods, and family and friends at the house), it is certainly still right for me to give thanks to God, for saving my mom's life on Tuesday, and for being here with us now in the hospital, even as she struggles through the pain. And, I've learned, how each day it is a choice to focus our eyes on Jesus, and it's a path that must be chosen every day, in every circumstance -- bad or good.