Lessons From Rehab

Having To Put Life Together Again

The Lord sure does have His unique ways of getting His points across. Several weeks ago I fell, tripping over the wire for the doggie run and landed on the concrete on my patio at 11:30 one night while letting my dog out before going to bed.  Oh the pain. Surely I didn’t break my hip…… did I?  The answer came soon enough. 

Somehow I skootched myself back inside to the front door of my apartment and began calling for help. I had been reduced to being a television commercial, hollering, “Help, I’ve fallen and I can’t get up.”  Fortunately, after a while, one of my neighbors heard me and came bearing a cell phone so I called my daughter Ellen first who lives around the corner, then realizing there was nothing she could do, I called 911. And thus my adventure began. 

Weeks before the Lord had been telling me I needed to rest. Not just rest in Him, but rest from all the activities I was involved with. I was admittedly exhausted, but how do you stop? So much to do, so many people to be with. I loved what I was doing, and presumed that I was doing it all for God and it all was His will; evidently such was not the case.  My thought was that what I was doing, despite the fact that I was always pushing past fatigue, was all part of serving Him. I then heard Him clearly say, “If you had something wrong with you, you would rest. So rest so you don’t have to have something wrong with you.”  Oh dear. Well, that got my attention.

I knew it was time to obey. I knew I had to take time off, a sabbatical. I talked it over with my pastor who said that when God asks you to rest like that, He often has something else He wants you to do. I cancelled my classes and Shabbat Service. I finished speaking engagements including in NC and settled into the intended rest. Only I didn’t know how to rest. Phone calls came, emails, lunches, dinners, people who wanted to talk and I wanted to talk with. A possible home fellowship start-up came to an abrupt halt as if God had pulled the plug before it even got started. But most of all, I didn’t know how to turn off my brain. I had been going and doing for so long, I couldn’t seem to turn it off.  

One day I said to the Lord, “I need you to show me what you mean by rest. I don’t seem to know how.  My internal motor is still running. What is Your idea of rest, Lord, and how do I get there?”  That night I fell.  I’m inclined to say the Lord stuck out His foot and tripped me in answer to my prayer that afternoon.  You don’t think God does things like that? Didn’t He discipline Israel when they needed it? Didn’t He impose years of not working the Land while in exile when they didn’t keep the Shabbats for 70 years? This wasn’t quite of that magnitude but I was getting the point.  

I later recalled a conversation I had years ago with a woman named Sandy Dodson (now with the Lord) who ministered in the power of the Holy Spirit in a conference for three entire days. I myself was healed of something that had been with me since my teens. I met her in the ladies room on the last day and said to her,, “ You must be exhausted after putting out all that energy for people.” But her response was this:  “God doesn’t use up His people. If you’re exhausted, then you’re ministering in the flesh and not the Spirit and you better find out where.”  Wish I’d remembered that earlier. 

And so began my saga of hip surgery and then rehab. I never knew this kind of pain and incapacitation. I’ve had to learn to walk all over again. But more importantly, the Lord has been teaching me how to walk with Him as I have not before. A restoration of a broken hip begins with realizing you have no ability whatsoever to move or lift that leg even an inch off the bed. It’s as good a dead, only any attempts at moving it is horribly painful so you know it’s not dead, it’s just incapable of doing anything.  It clearly brought to mind, “Without Me you can do nothing.”  

Oh I could do things with my hands, I could talk, I could do anything but what involved my hip. My understanding of what it is to “walk with God” took on new meaning. It starts with utter dependence upon Him, with nothing of ourselves alone that can facilitate truly walking with God. “Enoch walked with God and He was not for God took him”. What was it about Enoch’s walk with God that God ‘raptured’ him away to be with Him?  Many of us are awaiting such an event as “the rapture.”  Since ‘first mentions’ in the bible set the tone of things to come along those same lines, it would seem that for anyone to be “not for God took him” they would need to “walk with God” in a way that significantly sets them apart from those who do not.  

As I began physical therapy, tiny movements at a time, I had to start with learning how to sit up even a little (try eating lying down or on an incline), or how to move my leg just a little (try getting comfortable when you’ve been in the same position for hours). I could give you a list of what I had to learn to accomplish but my goal is to point out how absolutely dependent I was upon the nurses or the PT people for everything. The nurses, bless them, saw to my needs, and the P.T. folks taught me how to sit, walk, stand and move again. These were people who continually cared for those who could give nothing back to them (see photo at left).  I have become so very grateful for even little kindnesses and appreciative of how little it takes to bless or help someone else who may or may not be in need. 

In the meantime, between the pain and the fatigue, I was relegated to where I could do very little for myself. It didn’t take me long to say, “OK, Lord, I get it. Walking with You means resting in you because any effort of my own unless and until I am ready for it, is counter-productive, painful and useless.”  If we look at this from a spiritual point of view, how much energy do we expend that does not produce the intended results.

I once did an extensive study of the cause of God’s favor and disfavor. I was trying to figure out how to stay in His good graces.  It distilled down to two words, the difference between dependence and independence.  Every since I have attempted to live in godly dependence upon Him.  

But it is possible to think you are depending upon Him while doing more than He has been asking you to do. That, my friends, was an autobiographical statement. But I do wonder how much the church is doing that is not what He’s been asking us to do.  How many in ministry are burned out but unable to stop. How many meetings have many of us been attending without quality time with Him alone, or for that matter, neglecting other parts of our lives or family because we’re ‘doing the stuff’.  We’re busy people, most of us. Too busy. Slaves to efficiency and technology, driven by a guilt that doesn’t allow us to just say no. Or am I alone here? 

It has taken me several weeks of rethinking how I’ve been living my life, even “in Him”  to see that many of my activities haven’t produced the Kingdom life either in me or those who have been in my classes. Have we together learned a lot of good Biblical information, and has some of it even been transformational?  Yes, I would say so. But are we the Bride without spot or wrinkle that Yeshua is returning for yet?  I would say not. 

Years ago I heard the Lord say, “The Bride I come for will have eyes for no one and nothing other than Me.” He has a right to that kind of complete adoration, wouldn’t you say?  How distracted are we, though?  Even distracted with what we’re supposedly “doing for Him” including at the expense of being with Him.

When I got here in Rehab and saw my state of dependence in the natural, and then realized it mirrored what my dependence in the spiritual should be upon the Lord, I knew I needed a significant boost in my faith.  Since “Faith comes by hearing” I started listening to Scriptures online, specifically the Psalms. The first thing that happened was that I realized my Bible time wasn’t just about the Lord and me, but others were in there too. If I found something meaningful or a revelation popped out to me, I couldn’t wait to go and share it with or teach it to others.  I saw that my relationship with Yeshua was like a marriage that had too many others in the intimate places.  Part of my coming to rest was giving up the ‘striving’ to share what He showed me with others, but to allow that same insight to be just between me and Him, to be about our relationship, to be what he wanted to share of Himself with me – just me.  Not me and everyone else.  My first and primary ‘call’ is not about what I share with others, but as daughter, as lover, as adoring disciple, even to resting my head on His chest at times as John did. That, of course, applies to each and every one of us. 

I’m sure by now you get the picture of what I’m trying to say.  I have heard stories recently of several people who have also been confronted with finding their efforts for the Lord frustrated or ineffective, or they too, as it happened, were to some degree incapacitated in some way causing them to rethink their own walks with the Lord. There seems to be a pattern here.  If it happens to you, I urge you to heed the call! God is likely to want more of you for Himself than He’s had.          

I am now able to walk, s-l-o-w-l-y, though I must use a cane or a four wheeled walker for now. It is a reminder that I am walking with God – in no hurry. I'm finding new ways to put life back together at His pace. For those of us who look forward to being with Him forever, I have this feeling that we are living in a time when Bridal clothes are being given out. We don’t want to be too busy so that we miss hearing His voice calling us to intimate times with Him, and a life that becomes one in which we have eyes for no one else and nothing else but Him.  It’s something He must do, but giving Him our attention should sure move that along, wouldn’t you think?  In other words, right priorities!  To be His bride is to walk with Him, beside Him, and at His pace.  I hope to see you on the journey.