A Time to Keep Silence and a Time to Speak: When the Lord Delivers His People

The Lord delivers His people. We see it time and time again in scripture. Trials come, his people (eventually) cry to Him, he hears them, and he delivers them from their distress. Many of us have experienced something similar. Everything has purpose. But why did God take the time over and over to deliver His people? Why is he still doing so?

Let’s look at the Psalms. 

They’re full of so much goodness. They’re also full of a range of emotions- anger, despondency, joy, despair, terror.

We see the psalmists ask God to set a guard over their mouths. Keep watch over the door of their lips. (141:3). 

Psalm 4 tells us to be angry, but don’t sin. Ponder in our own hearts and on our beds and be silent. 

There are so many references to our mouths/words in the Psalms. That alone is another post. But. If we are to guard our words, even to the point of silence at times…when we do speak, what are we to say?

In the 66th Psalm, the psalmist writes:
Come and hear all you who fear God, and I will tell what he has done for my soul. 

That’s what I want to do today– tell you some of what He has done for my soul.

In Psalm 107:1-3, we read: 

Oh give thanks to the Lord, for he is good, for his steadfast love endures forever! 
Let the redeemed of the Lord say so, whom he has redeemed from trouble and gathered in from the lands, from the east and from the west, from the north and from the south. 

Let the redeemed of the Lord say so. 

The Psalmist goes on to tell the story of the redeemed- where they’ve come from and what the Lord has done. It’s really beautiful. 

Some wandered in the desert, finding no way to a city to dwell in. Faint, hungry.  They cried to the Lord.  He led them by a straight way until they reached a city to dwell in. 

Do you see it? The Lord delivers His people.

Some sat in darkness and the shadow of death, prisoners. They’d rebelled against God. They suffered consequences and endured hard labor. No one could help. They cried out to him, the God they’d rebelled against. 

He brought them out of darkness and the shadow of death, and HE BURST THEIR BONDS APART.

The Lord delivers His people.

Some were fools through their sinful ways. Because of this, they suffered physical affliction and were near death. They couldn’t eat, they loathed food. Then they cried to the Lord in their trouble. 

The Lord delivers His people.

Some went about their business, down at sea. They saw the great waters. They saw the stormy wind and waves. They were tossed about, they were scared and at their wits’ end. They cried to the Lord.  The storm stilled at His command. The waves were hushed.

The Lord delivers His people.

Some wandered. Some were prisoners. Some were sick. Some were businessmen of sorts. All were in distress.

His people cried .

The Lord delivers His people.

He satisfied the longing soul.
The hungry soul he filled with good things.
He shattered the doors of bronze and cut in two the bars of iron. 
He sent out his word and healed them. He delivered them from their destruction.
They were glad when the waters were quiet. He brought them to their desired haven.

What about you? What’s your story? He’s given us all at least one. Today I’m going to tell you one of mine.

Some sat in a hospital room. Wondering and confused. Seeking answers, desperate for a miracle. Looking at a baby with a disease approximately 0% of the population of the entire world has. A baby who was bleeding to death internally.

 

Some were afraid, distressed.

 

Some… no, all lacked knowledge.

 

Some lacked blood donors.

 

They cried out to God.

 

He led: 
a doctor just beginning his career at that very hospital, coming from another hospital across the country…a hospital who discovered the very disease that sweet baby had. Literally one of the only people in the world who could’ve known what was happening to that baby was led to our hospital doorstep. 

 

He led: 
people from all over our state to the Blood Institute’s office. Lined up around the door. Every one of them there to donate blood for that sweet baby. So moving that the employees called that baby’s mama to say they’d never seen anything like it. 

 

He led: 
a doctor to make rounds at just the time that baby was coding, when the nurse on duty that shift didn’t believe he was really sick. As he was fighting to stay alive, that doctor entered the wing we were staying in and rushed in and helped to save my baby’s life.

 

He led: 
a small group of parents to find one another. From across the nation and world, with kiddos suffering from the same disease. Some of these mamas were my lifeline in a time the waves were over my head on a daily basis.

 

He delivered: 
cards, prayers, pastors who stay up all night watching monitors in the ICU so that you can sleep, nurses who became friends and family.

 

He delivered: 
friends and a community who pay for expenses you don’t know how you’ll ever afford. 

 

He delivered: 
A message of “it’s over” on a day that I was at my wit’s end and didn’t think I could go on anymore. 

The Lord delivers His people.

Rewinding a bit/further back story:

When this particular baby, my second child, was born, we didn’t know it immediately, but something wasn’t right. Once we realized, we couldn’t get any answers and felt dismissed when we brought up concerns. 

Upon insistence, we were eventually sent to a specialist, who “happened” to have a last minute opening.

He took one look at our son and said “that baby needs a blood transfusion.” He gave us an entire whiteboard list of what he thought might be wrong with our son, ordered some labs, and sent us on our way. 

Labs came back while we were out to lunch that very day and he said we immediately needed to go to Children’s Hospital, as our baby had critically low hemoglobin and platelets.

He was hemorrhaging somewhere internally. 

We arrived and staff immediately started trying to gain access to a vein so blood products could be given, but he was so anemic it was almost impossible to gain access. Finally a nurse from another floor came to us in the PICU and was successful. 

We spent a week or so with hematologists and oncologists and no one knew what was wrong. One doctor told us it was probably nothing major and we’d be home by the weekend. 

He was wrong.

A doctor on the Gastro-Intestinal service came to see us, and had a suggestion of what we might be dealing with. “Multifocal lymphangioendotheliomatosis with thrombocytopenia (MLT). But don’t google it,” he said. 

Commence googling.

It did not look good. 

Because MLT was so incredibly rare– with less than thirty known cases WORLDWIDE at the time– the doctor told us we probably weren’t dealing with that. However, he’d seen it before so wanted to rule it out.

Wait what? He’d seen it before? This super rare disease no one knew about? How?

He saw it at the hospital he was at previously.
The one where he’d just finished his fellowship.
The one where this disease was named and discovered.
Oh, and this was, I believe, his first week on the job at the hospital we were at.

(Here’s where I insert the reminder: The Lord goes before us. Always.)

Spoiler alert: it was the dreaded MLT. It wasn’t some other scary things we were afraid of. But it was instead something no one really knew anything about, there were no known drugs to cure or even manage the disease.

(We asked one day how he would go to school with this disease, as some of his medications we tried were continual and intravenous. The doctors’ responded something like “we are so glad you’re looking ahead to that.” And it was in that moment we knew, they didn’t expect him to live. This still takes my breath away.)

We tried a few things, found some successes and some failures. The riskiest options we declined. Some less risky short term options, like steroids (which seemed to work really well) had significant risks with long term use. 

(Sidebar entry level course on MLT): MLT consists of lesions, mainly in the GI tract but also in other tissues, organs, and bones. The vast majority of these children have multiple external lesions that look like moles. The external lesions are rarely problematic but are indicative of an underlying concern. 

Our baby had no external lesions, so we had no idea at birth that he was ill. 

The GI lesions proliferate and cause massive internal bleeding for some– like our son. His stomach and intestines bled often, causing him GI distress. 

MLT also involves low platelets. Platelets help our blood clot. If you’re bleeding, you want platelets. Our baby didn’t have many. But you can transfuse them so that’s great, right?

Not with MLT. MLT is a platelet trapping disease. Meaning when we would transfuse platelets to stop the bleeding, they’d actually just proliferate the lesions making them more irritated and causing more profuse bleeding. 

So we didn’t transfuse platelets unless they were super low, around 10,000 (150,000-450,000 is normal, for reference).

I remember before an official diagnosis, being sent for a scan and holding my baby on my shoulder, bouncing him as a mother does…and his tiny body vomiting more blood than I’d ever seen at one time. All over the floor. It was horrific.

We were sent straight  back to the ICU where he vomited blood again upon entry of the wing– calling everyone to attention. All hands on deck and all of that. It was one of the scariest days of my life. 

It wasn’t the only time that happened, either.

I remember one day a doctor telling us “we can’t just keep giving him blood transfusions” and explaining the risks to me. Our baby was receiving blood transfusions multiple times a week at that point. 

I looked at that doctor and said “Well what else are we going to do? It’s keeping him alive.” And so that’s what we did. 

We lived in that hospital for about six months straight with zero discharges.

Our son was around two months old when he left our home for the hospital…and eight months old the next time he was in our house. The entire year following that was spent predominately in the hospital. 

And when I felt like there was nothing left to give, when my heart was so weary, I spent one early morning in the hospital room crying out to God that I just couldn’t do it anymore. 

And I heard him say to my heart, “It’s over.” And I asked him to please say it again because I thought maybe I was imagining things. And again, to my heart he said, “It’s over.”

And it was. Our baby began to improve from that day forward. About two years after the entire process began, he never received another blood transfusion. And was on no medication. When he was 6 or so, he was released from all medical care. 

And that is a VERY short version of a VERY long story.

 

Why does He redeem?

They cried. He delivered.

But why? 

Psalm 107 tells us that part, too.

“Let them thank the Lord for his steadfast love, for his wondrous works to the children of man! And let them offer sacrifices of thanksgiving and tell of his deeds in songs of joy! Let them extol him in the congregation of the people, and praise him in the assembly of the elders.”

He redeems us– in his steadfast love, through his wondrous works– so that we will declare his name. 

That we will be thankful, and full of songs of joy. 

That we will praise Him in the presence of people. 

Remembering and telling what the Lord has done is a way we pass down Truth. It’s a way we share the Gospel. We see this throughout scripture, the retelling of journeys taken by God’s people, and works God has done. As His people, neither are we exempt from telling the stories of what God has done in our lives.

If you are among the redeemed, you have a reason to say so. 

Psalm 102: 18
Let this be recorded for a generation to come, so that a people yet to be created may praise the Lord: 
That he looked down from his holy height; from heaven the Lord looked at the earth, to hear the groans of the prisoners, to set free those who were doomed to die, 
That they may declare in Zion the name of the Lord, and Jerusalem his praise, when peoples gather together, and kingdoms, to worship the Lord.

Soli Deo Gloria. Glory to God Alone.

 

 

©Alisha H. Cary 2020