Fears

Multiple times over the last few weeks I have had the opportunity to talk about our experience this year when Maddie was hospitalized in China with pneumonia. It is both a painful and joyful thing for me to talk about, and I very rarely do so without a few tears. It was both a very difficult and very precious time in our lives. I often get asked the question, "How can you handle living with your kids in a place like that, I would never be able to do that" I always struggle to answer that question a little, because it always raises insecurities in my heart, that perhaps we are not doing the right thing by living in a country with poor medical care. I start to wonder what kind of parents we are to subject our children to the possible dangers of a poor medical system.

As I struggled with the answer to that question in my heart, God brought a few passages to my attention that helped to calm my fears. Looking back, we can clearly see that God used our experience with Maddie's pneumonia to challenge and deepen our faith in Him. Having one of my children become seriously sick while we were in China had been my deepest fear when we moved. The more I saw of the medical system, the more this fear increased in my heart. God used that time in our lives to specifically challenge that fear. Last week I was reading the story of King Asa in II Chronicles 16. The Bible records that he was initially a good king who served the Lord, but later in his life he became angry with God. God sent him a disease specifically to turn his heart back to the Lord, but instead of trusting God, the passage states that he chose to put his trust in physicians. This struck a chord with me. Although at that time, I had not been angry at the Lord, I was deeply afraid, and I know that God specifically allowed us that experience so that I would learn to put my trust in the Lord and not in physicians. For me, returning to America simply out of fear over what could happen would be to place my trust in the medical system instead of in the God who both created my children's bodies and controls our medical knowledge. II Corinthians 4:16-18 which has been precious to us this year reminds us that we are to focus our hearts on the unseen and eternal instead of what we can see with our eyes. I would love to have reliable medications, doctors, and hospitals, but what I DO have is a Heavenly Father who is more reliable and more able than any medical system to care for my children. I don't ever need to fear that He will fail me or them. He loves them far more than I ever could. It would be so foolish of me to place my precious children in the hands of a fallible medical system when I have an infallible God. We know we are where God wants us to be right now, so we have nothing to fear.

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