As sure as the sun will rise, and take away the night, His mercy will not end.

Ellie Holcolmb– As Sure As the Sun

The Bible is full of accounts and recounts of all the things God has done for His people, all the ways He has led them and all the miracles He has performed for them. There is one story that is both beautiful and sad, and it’s actually told three different times in three different places. Hezekiah was a king of Israel during the time Isaiah was around as a prophet. Hezekiah was 25 when he took the throne and reigned for 29 years before he died; during his reign he “did what was right in the sight of the Lord.” (2 Chronicles 29:2) But halfway through his reign he came down with an illness and was told by Isaiah that he would die. So Hezekiah “wept sore” and prayed to the Lord. Then the Lord spoke to Isaiah and told him to tell Hezekiah, “I have heard your prayer, I have seen your tears–behold, I will heal you.” (2 Kings 20:5) The Lord caused the shadow on the sun dial to go back 10 degrees as proof to Hezekiah that He would do what He said, and Hezekiah was healed. 

A little while afterwards, there were some visitors from neighboring countries that had heard about Hezekiah’s illness and recovery and came to visit him with letters and gifts. Instead of telling them what God had done, Hezekiah took the opportunity to show them everything in his house–all the gold and silver and armor and treasures he had collected. 

The story goes on, but I’m stopping here because this is the part that saddens me. 

In the commentary from the book Prophets and Kings, we are told that the people who came to Hezekiah were sent by their king to “learn more, if possible, more of the God who was able to perform such a wonder.” And Hezekiah missed it.

So let me tell you what my God has done. 

In November of 2009, my mom was diagnosed with end-stage liver cirrhosis. This is an alcoholic’s disease, although a very small percentage of people can get it even if they’ve never drank. My mom was one of those. Years went by of her condition getting worse and worse. Her liver couldn’t filter out toxins from her blood so it would collect in her brain and give her symptoms similar to dementia. In the early stages she would start getting really bad mood swings, then fall asleep very easily, then she would get confused. She would forget things, then she couldn’t do simple addition. If it continued to progress, she would wake up the next morning and not remember who we were, or what year it was, or how to flush a toilet or get paper towels off a roll or eat with a fork. One time, it progressed all the way to landing her comatose in the ICU with doctors worried and not quite sure how to fix her. They asked us what her wishes were, as though they were anticipating she wouldn’t make it. Thankfully, that time, after so many people prayed for her, the doctors decided to try one simple intervention before taking her to OR for exploratory surgery that she wouldn’t have survived–that one thing worked and she woke up and started improving almost immediately.

We had medicine that we could give her to pull her out of these spells, but sometimes it would get so bad that we couldn’t fix it at home. ER visit. Hospital stay. Rinse and repeat. 

Another problem was that her liver didn’t manage fluid very well. Her lungs would fill up to where she was literally breathing out of half of one of her lungs. ER visit. Hospital stay. Rinse and repeat. 

Patients with cirrhosis this bad only have two options: get a liver transplant, or eventually die from the disease. If it’s caught early, in stage 2 or below, the progress can be stopped and sometimes reversed to some degree.

Unfortunately, mom was diagnosed in end-stage, stage 4. Her previous doctor had missed the abnormal liver function tests on her labs for over 20 years, and only after seeing a new doctor had she ever been told that there was no such thing as a “high normal.” That new doctor sent her for a biopsy which revealed the problem. 

They gave her 3-4 years to live at the time she was diagnosed.

She saw a liver transplant specialist at University of Chicago, and they decided she was too complicated for their program.

In 2014 she was referred to Loyola Medical Center, and God worked things out for her insurance to cover it when everyone thought it wouldn’t. They placed a stent in her liver that would stop the fluid build up in her lungs and hopefully extend her life to buy her time to get a transplant.

Loyola evaluated her for their transplant list–and then they also decided she was too complicated for them.

One year later the stent failed– the fluid started backing up into her lungs again.

We were running out of time.

As we continued to take her to the ER every few weeks when she needed her lungs pumped out, or some IV fluids and medicine to manage confusion, every time seemed like she was getting worse faster.

I was in college at the time, and was burning up the roads from Michigan to Chicago on weekends. The stress was almost unbearable. One night, after hearing my mom’s lungs were full again and worse than they’d ever been, I laid in bed sobbing and praying that God would let me know He was there with me. I just wanted to touch the hem of His garment as He passed by if nothing else–(Matthew 9:20) knowing that even that much contact could inject enough of His strength into my life to get me through this. That night, I had a dream. My family was running in a field being chased by a tornado. Now, I’d had dreams of tornadoes for decades, since I was a little girl. At first they started off out in the distance, and as the years passed and I continued to get these dreams, the tornadoes would come closer and closer in every dream. But this one was different. In this particular dream, the tornado was as close as it had ever been. We were running in a field, trying to escape from it. Just as we realized we couldn’t outrun it, it eclipsed us–we stopped where we were in the field and looked up to the sky just as this tornado circled around right in front of us. As it came around to the other side, the tornado dissipated into a flock of doves that flew away. The sky cleared up and the tornado was gone. 

In the Bible, the dove was a symbol of God’s Holy Spirit and peace: after the flood it was a dove that brought back to Noah the olive leaf, showing him that the storm was over and that everything was going to be okay. God showed me that night that He was going to have mercy on us– that we would have peace. He was there, and that was enough.

I didn’t have any more tornado dreams after that. Just as everything changed in a moment’s notice in the dream, this was the exact point that everything changed in my mom’s story as well. ☸

(to be continued)