Turtles and Lungs and God’s Presence

A few months ago, I was walking home from work when I saw a turtle in the river, moored on a rock in the afternoon sun. It was such an oddity, I took a picture of it.

It was a very specific rock, as you can see, visible off-shore between the leaves.

I didn’t think, “What a nice afternoon that turtle is having on his porch!”  I had never seen him before. Maybe he was on a daring mission to see the world and would paddle off at nightfall.  Maybe there aren’t even turtles in the St. Joseph’s River, and this one was just hopelessly lost and about to drown.  I don’t know.  I don’t know turtles and I’ve never seen one there before.  I treated him like a tourist. I almost sent the picture to my friends with instructions to drive slowly down Lexington Avenue.

Then I continued on my way, coming and going to work, only occasionally on foot.  If I sleep too long, it’s faster to drive.

About once a week at the hospital, someone comes to us with a collapsed lung. It’s often tall, thin young people, more commonly males, and often but not always, smokers.

I have often been with one of the surgeons when he talks to these unfortunate young people who suddenly find themselves consigned to the hospital for a few days. Sometimes they are just teenagers, with their forty-year-old parents sitting by them in concern.  Sometimes they are young mothers with children.  Sometimes they are old.

The surgeon explains to them that usually what happens is that there is a blister or bubble on the top of the lung that pops, and the lung collapses like a balloon. Instead of filling up the lung space, it shrinks, sometimes to a fraction of the size it should be.

The first time this happens, he explains, we put a chest tube into the lung space and hook it up to suction, a little bit like a vacuum cleaner. The lung fills the space again, and hopefully in a few days it will heal, and stay expanded even after the suction is taken off and the chest tube is taken out.

“The first time this happens,” the surgeon explains, “we let you go because there’s a fifty percent chance it will never happen again.  Of course, there is a fifty percent chance that it will happen again.

“If it happens again, there is a 90% chance that it will happen a third time. So on the second event we talk about doing surgery to get the lung to stick up against the chest wall and stay there.”

I always find these statistics interesting. What is it about that second time that forces our hand to surgery, forces us to believe that it will happen again?  Experience, I guess.  The accumulation of many statistics.

Now I don’t think we need to make statistics out of answers to prayer or God’s presence. But I’ve noticed that each time God answers my prayers, my conviction that it will happen again becomes stronger.

The other day I felt like I was walking through “the valley of the shadow of death”.  It wasn’t just that my lawnmower was stolen, or the fact that my car is making a funny noise.  I did dream that my neighborhood children tore my new mini barn apart, but beyond that there were things even more ominous going on, things that could not have just happened apart from a spiritual warfare.  One night, I found myself with my feet in a steaming hot water bath, clutching a cup of hot beef broth and listening to “calming music”.  I almost laughed at myself.

It wasn’t that I had forgotten everything that God had done for me in the past, but those times seemed so distant.  Maybe I was really wrong but this, this, and this, I said to myself in the thick of the battle. (Lord, increase my faith!) What does love look like in this situation? I asked a friend. I really don’t know.  But I am determined to love anyway.

A few hours later, in the thick of the struggle, a quiet idea was breathed upon me of a way I could show love.

That probably won’t work, I thought, but it gave me hope, so I tried it.

It worked.

That did it, and I knew that He was with me in this valley and I needed to “fear no evil.”

My faith still falters at times, yes, but I’ve noticed (thank God!) that even on the darkest days when I am assaulted on all sides, the faltering of my faith seems to last for progressively shorter times. Then, as I reach for God’s hand, at some point, I see it.

I know it is real, and it will happen again.

Perhaps faith based on experience shows our weakness, but perhaps it is just part of being human. And God seems to be okay with us recounting His past goodness to give us power to go on. It is what David did when Saul doubted his ability to fight Goliath. “And David said, “The LORD who delivered me from the paw of the lion and from the paw of the bear will deliver me from the hand of this Philistine” (ESV I Samuel 17:37). It is what George Muller said at the end of a life devoted to prayers for his orphanage and for the souls of others.  At the beginning, he had the faith to trust God for little things, he said, but after seeing his faithfulness time after time, he could now trust God with any request.

In fact, when George Muller was asked what he thought about having a fund with reserve money, he was quite astonished.  “To do so would be an act of the greatest folly. How could I pray if I had reserves?”  (see full article here.)

Then last night, I was trudging home from work. I passed the house with the flower gardens, and its owner was out watering flowers.

“I love your flowers,” I said.

The sidewalk curved on and slanted down around the river bank. As I walked past that break in the trees, I startled a pack of five geese, and they swam away from me. Beyond them, on that same rock, the turtle was sunning himself.

Oh, I thought. So it’s not an anomaly. So he goes there all the time. So that’s his rock. He’s my neighbor, not a tourist! I no longer think that first time I saw the turtle was random.  Seeing it just one more time leads me to believe that the turtle is always there, even when I don’t see him.

I have seen God work, not twice, but many times.

I know He is real, and I will see Him again.