Come up higher

Yesterday my husband went to an “after your heart attack” session at the hospital. It was about emotions, and he came home with some wisdom for me. He said that spouses might have strong responses too, one of them being grief over the losses that this brings.

I’d not felt much before that. Under stress, I seldom get emotional, usually absent-minded. However, after we talked about it, I was swept with great sorrow. It wasn’t just the heart attack that has produced loss in our lives. Things changed when he was diagnosed with CLL last June. Things changed in August when our granddaughter moved in. Now things change again.

With CLL, the immune system must be guarded. To have a healthy heart, we must follow the Mediterranean food plan, get enough exercise. With another person in the house (who still has a particular set of problems) we must guard other areas of our lives, and hers. Before, the calendar was filled and we were busy. Now the calendar is still full and we must add more things.

No one can add without subtracting, and subtracting means loss, sometimes loss of things held dear, or at least greatly enjoyed. This isn’t for just one month while healing happens; these are changes that have no end, no going back to ‘normal’ — which is only a setting on the dryer anyway! But unlike that setting that we can control, we didn’t ask for these events, nor expect them. While I have done my best to accept what God has ordained, at the same time, there is a huge sense of being grossly inadequate to settle into this new ‘normal.’

This morning Psalm 42 sounds a bit like I feel. The writer is thirsty for God and for what used to be. He is cast down, disquieted, remembering the best of the past. He feels that God has forgotten him and says, “Deep calls unto deep at the noise of Your waterfalls; all Your waves and billows have gone over me” (Psalm 42:7).

While this is an expression of drowning in trials, I got a picture in my mind of what God’s waterfall would be like. I’m looking up at a torrent coming over a precipice and think, He is up there letting all this come down on me. Then I thought, If I was up there too, I wouldn’t feel as if I were under this, but above it.

At that, I hear a still, small voice saying, “Come up higher” and suddenly my understanding changes. I’ve been sitting in the back row like the man commended by Jesus in Luke 14:7-11, and God is asking me to move from what I’ve known to a new place, a place closer to Him. Yes, it means leaving the old and comfortable, but how can I fear changing where I am if it means being nearer to Him? Isn’t that what I want anyway?

In My Utmost for His Highest, Oswald Chambers says, “If in the externals of your life you live up to the highest you know, God will continually say—‘Friend, go up higher.’ The golden rule in temptation is—‘Go higher.’ When you get higher up, you face other temptations and characteristics. Satan uses the strategy of elevation in temptation, and God does the same, but the effect is different. When the devil puts you into an elevated place, he makes you screw your idea of holiness beyond what flesh and blood could ever bear. It is a spiritual acrobatic performance, you are just poised and dare not move; but when God elevates you by His grace into the heavenly places, instead of finding a pinnacle to cling to, you find a great table-land where it is easy to move.” (March 27).

Deep calls to deep. In the calling, I can see beyond this flooded and drowning sensation to a glassy clear and very deep lake, a place to rest and enjoy—before He again calls me to go upstream.