TTTS. I know when we are visited by something life shaking, it forever leaves a mark. Many things have left their mark on me, but I could not have anticipated what TTTS would have brought into our lives. As a disease, I hate it. You know how dreadful that feeling is when you have a sick little one, crying, struggling, calling out for help in pain … Elise fell most ill when she was young and I remember watching her bent over the toilet with a burning anger in my heart. I wanted to turn into a renegade warrior, super mini-size and jump into her bloodstream and go into mortal combat with that bug that had laid such dreadful siege of her. But I was powerless. All I could do was watch the pain with pain. Her life was not in danger. And there were my boys, our mirror image twins slipping away from us as Bryce was rammed so full of blood his heart was falling apart and River was drying up, seemingly by the hour: trapped twin, seran wrapped in a fluidless sac and pinned with his lips against the wall, against the placenta to be precise. Barely moving, but how could he? Where did he have to go? His tiny world was closing in on him and there was nothing I could do. We held on. We prayed. You prayed. We wept, shut down, spoke out, reached out, you name it, as we waited on the unknown of how they would react to the surgery we were filled with both a dread for the procedure and a passion to get through it. TTTS is a rare condition that will forever leave a mark on us and our home. These boys will be held high in incredible celebration when they are born. They will be our Miracle babies. Some of you have one or two of those. I can now start to feel the intensity of the joy and gratitude you must have felt, might even feel today. You can imagine how musical it was to hear Dr. Scott say that it now looked like a normal twin pregnancy in our ultrasound Monday. Their fluid levels were about equal. They are the same size. They are growing neck and neck.
It is all just starting to sink in. At the time, some of the emotion was so intense, I did not have the capacity to process it and keep moving. I could not fully feel it. Both the desperation and the triumph when we first heard two heartbeats the day after – those emotions were simply muted at the time. I am starting to further unpack the experience and process the full range of emotion we walked through. Bits of it come to me with a different intensity and a new angle. I will be taking inventory of our takeaways on this for months, maybe years to come. But one thing that has struck me with some astonishment lately, something I was mulling on tonight, mulling with some sense of marvel is just what an amazing thing the true mystical church really is.
I have met my fair share of church-burned ex-faithful. I have haunted many a hall in AA and heard story after story of how and why one cannot call their higher power God. Almost every one of us must have some rough patch we walked through, even the most faithful of saints, due to the hypocrisy of the carnal church. Most every one of us has been burned, sometimes deeply wounded by a Christian who came in and made residence in our hearts, our homes, our business under the pretense of being a child of God, then, when backed into a corner, the knives came out swinging just like any other scoundrel. And they cut. Some have been cut by their spiritual leaders. Some have had their overbearing parents drive them so far away from the faithful that reconciliation is not in their vocabulary. And I have come to understand a profound difference between the mystical bride of Christ and the institution of the church. All of us “churched” folk that have healed from our scars have come to that point where we see a division. But sometimes that line is blurred. Sometimes the “political” church is all you can see. Sometimes, even on the inside, the church seems every bit as sick as the world around it. Every bit as ripped apart by self and sin. We have affairs. We divorce. We are alcoholics, sex addicts, shopaholics sometimes to a similar degree as those on the outside. I was a card punching member in good standing of a local church when I was drinking myself into oblivion almost every night and ripping my family apart with irrational anger. I might have even been seen as a leader, at least a leader in the wings. Communion made me uncomfortable, I even tried to avoid it. To let it pass would be to invite questions. Someone might come poking into my nasty closet. To drink and eat was to deaden an already seared conscience even more. Every time. I cannot toss any stones at the hypocrites among us – I have ranked among the worst.
So with that in mind, how is it that I find myself basking in all the blessings of the true, mystical church? How is it that we have been forgiven and benefited with such grace that even those who have not met us before are coming to our house to help Nicole during the long slow days? How is it, provided my past, that now in my present I know I do not live in 66 A.D. but I feel like I am living in the beginning of the book of acts? This is a message I wanted some of you to know and understand. Regardless how burned you have been, regardless how much burning you have done, the mystical body of Christ is alive and well and as in tact today as it was in the long lost days so many of us lament of the early brethren. Is the church full of sick people? Yes. Is it full of ‘sinners’, yes. Are some churches far more concerned with making people feel good and important than making God be glorified? Yes. Are some churches more concerned with presidential politics than with serving the broken, lost, and poor? Yes. Are there Fox news thumpers quick to condemn those that think differently in the church? Yes. Is there dogma, abuse of authority? Yes. Is there divisiveness and rampant demoninationalism, church splitting over things as silly as a hymnal? Yes. There are those who line up on Sunday every bit as sick as I was when I was punching the church card. Heaps, masses of those. How many come to church with a hangover and blurred memory of what they did or who they were with the night before? I don’t know. But I was one of their lot for MANY years and I know I was not alone.
I had no idea how hard it would be coming home with Nicole on bed rest, with our many kids and our one-year-old Eden. I had no idea because from the time it became our apparent reality, I hadn’t the time to really think about it. We were in survival mode. Not planning mode. And before we came home Crystal Middleton has launched an effort to get us quirky veggie lovers fed and folks had signed up to the end of April! Before the first workday hit upon our return Danielle Wilke had created a spreadsheet of helpers for Nicole in the day, folks to help clean, laundry, my word, every day was covered for childcare and cleaning in the first week. Sunday as I was walking the kids out to the car after worship, Jill came up to me and introduced herself as the one keeping Eden at my home on Tuesday. She had not even met us in person and she signed up to help my wife and kids. Are you kidding me? This stuff is not normal. This is not how normal self-seeking folks behave. Sharon T., a woman so full of grace and wisdom that you can see it miles away will be picking my kids up one day from CCS and keeping them for two afternoons this week. What a privilege to have such a godly woman in our home. Lucy Wykoff whose life and whose kids have been and will be a blessing to countless people for generations takes delight in keeping Eden, doing laundry, you name it. I am talking giants of faith coming on side. Mindy Haywood who has a house full of her own with health challenges to boot is coming to clean our house this week. Danielle who has five kids in a house built for three is playing point guard. Crystal, whose family is caught in a dreadful battle not of their own making cleaned our house while we were away and headed up the meal train. A close friend brought by a large and unreasonably generous gift to help pay to have work completed on the master bed and bath. Friends are planning in-home double dates with Nicole and I to giver her some sense of frivolity and normalcy as she lay there chained to the sofa or bed. Geff and Jon, deacons both have already arranged to come paint our master bath. Andy, and Gene Smith who have also offered to come. Jenand Derick Ball who called about the bath as we were leaving town.
There is nothing exceptional about Nicole and I. We are not the most giving, most inspiring, most accomplished, most loving, most faithful members of the community. Our lives are somewhat quiet and somewhat constant. We have not earned stature in our church or our community. We are simply a part of it. We neither stand out nor fade in. We are part of the fabric and pleased to be woven in. Yet the body of Christ has wrapped its arms around its own in a way that I think can only point back to those radical days so many of us pine for in the ACTS of old.
I am wrong about a lot of things. My opinions are about as useful to someone else as a used rag. And I cannot say “you are wrong” and “you are right” for I am the judge of no man. I cannot say this church is sick, this church carnal, this church political. I can say what fruit I see. I can see a tree with no fruit and notice the lack of fruit, but I do not know the tree. But I have come to believe that the particular bit of the huge mystical body of Christ that we are a part of, Covenant Presbyterian Church is an unusually healthy place for sinners to find and feel redeemed because it is not a place about making us feel good, about creating high emotion or entertaining us. My word, according to Nicole, the services can be profoundly starchy. And yes, we have some of the frozen chosen of a traditional Presbyterian church. But I see Christ in a hundred faces. I see a place alive with His love. I see people doing small but heroic things for others. And I think, I think it is because above all, the liturgy, the hymns, the exegetical preaching, the formalities are all designed, all thought out not to attract and entertain, but to glorify God. It is about making us right with God, not making us feel good about ourselves. Being right with God brings a wholeness in ones self, but you don’t go into self to get to God. You go beyond self to get there. And I am not saying that contemporary worship, soul worship, a lack of liturgy, or any other formality cannot achieve some mystical health in the body. Far from it! I think it has FAR LESS to do with the instrumentation and the songs and far more to do with the heart and intent. Are we submitting to a God-centered world, or are we creating a man-centered religion? I am more than convinced that God can be just as glorified in African drums as he can in High English hymns. But are we about dying to self to live as Christ or are we about conscripting the power and authority of God to make ourselves more what we want to be? I think when Nietzsche had his madman claim that God is dead he was attacking a religion that had humankind at its heart. He was saying that this religion of man for man has run its course. Its days are numbered. We have slain god by pulling back the emperor’s clothes.
“Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world.” I think in seeing glory come through weakness, in defending the defenseless, in fighting for the life and dignity of those like orphans (think Jewish culture of old) and widows (again, think how Jewish culture of old esteemed the orphan and the widow – not very much) we are demonstrating the heart of Christ in us. I think the best way to see the face of Christ is not by being barked at with some do this – do that, but to have a meal brought by on a Saturday night when the family is fighting, struggling for their defenseless – in our case, our unborn sons. It is in those who come to pick up Eden while Nicole can’t, it is in those who fold laundry when they have a mountain of their own to fold. And seeing the face of Jesus come like this into our home each day has burned a new and wonderful hole in my heart. I am slow to learn. Slower to purify. It takes strong winds to move me. But seeing the mystical body in action seems to be just as amazing as seeing your boys pull through TTTS (so far) okay. Nicole and I don’t deserve this help and love. But that’s just the point. That’s just the point He is making to me as he is calling us on further to love those unloved, to help the helpless both inside and outside my home.
Again, thank you for every word of encouragement, every prayer, every call or text or facebook post. May we, those of us who have received amazing grace, never withhold it from those in need.
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