Читать книгу I didn´t ask to be gold - Patricia Adrianzén de Vergara - Страница 15

8

STAINLESS-STEEL FAITH

Though I walk in the midst of trouble, you preserve my life.

(Psalm 138:7)

I gently laid her in her crib. She was finally asleep. We were both exhausted. I sat next to her and watched her: so tiny, so weak, so helpless. Why, God? Didn’t they tell us she was already healthy? What’s wrong with her now? Why doesn’t her fever go down? I looked at the children’s decorations on the walls, trying to hold back my tears, and I felt very lonely. My family was far away. Back home, whenever my son got sick, they used to come. I felt so safe. But here, my husband would take a long time to come back from church. I was afraid of the fever. “I am so lonely, my daughter! But I will take care of you. I will not move from your side.” From time to time I touched her forehead. The fever would not go away. I prayed—yes, I prayed.

The doorbell rang. A frail woman was at the door: the missionary who was part of our pastoral team. She’d arrived a few months after us. She had looked for me at the church, because I was supposed to be there that day. When she didn’t find me, she came home to see what was going on. She brought us some biscuits she’d made for us. Wasn’t God telling me that I was not alone? I showed her into the baby’s room. We sat and chatted very quietly so as not to wake her up.

“How is she? Is she very bad?”

“She has a high fever.”

“What does the doctor say?”

“That there’s nothing to justify the fever. He just found her throat a little red”.

“Nothing else?”

I stopped crying. “Nothing else,” I said.

“Strange, isn’t it? In Lima this didn’t happen to you.”

I pretended to be strong. “No, it didn’t happen to me.”

Her understanding, her sympathy, her affection, the biscuits she’d made for me that day, her voice trying to cheer me up, and her arms were precisely what I needed to cry and unburden myself. With this visit God was telling me, “Come on, daughter, cry. Let it out. Express what you feel—your doubts, your fears.”

But I did not cry. I pretended to be strong. I had wiped away the tears that were already flowing before I opened the door, so I kept that attitude. My daughter had been sick for a year without a break. I needed to cry, but I let my friend go.

Alone again, I stroked my five-month pregnant belly and became fearful again. I gave Nataly a new dose of antipyretic. She vomited it up. I felt alone again.

My husband arrived in the evening after a hard day’s work. I was sure he had many concerns. But he looked at me, was surprised by my woeful expression, and said: “Why that face”?

Those words were enough to make me feel very lonely again. I had been waiting for him to cry with him and my emotional state made me feel misunderstood. I ran to the bedroom, locked myself in, and wept. I cried out loud everything I hadn’t cried in a year of constant stress and illness. I sobbed telling God that I didn’t understand why He didn’t give us some rest, why we had no victory over the disease, why my baby had to keep suffering, why He didn’t seem to answer us, why we had to go to the doctor when He had so much power. I cried about my doubts: wasn’t it your will that we come here?

I kept crying. My husband knocked on the bedroom door and begged me to calm down. He feared crying so much would hurt me, as I was pregnant. I wanted to keep crying, but I immediately obeyed him when he mentioned the baby I was expecting. After all, a mother always thinks first of the welfare of her children; I did not want for anything in the world to harm the child I was carrying in my womb.

I prayed more calmly. It had been good to pour my heart out before God. My faith did not have to fail. I had to get up and trust in Him. He did not promise that everything would be easy. Besides, He had never abandoned us; He had always strengthened us, otherwise, how did we get here? I prayed with a different attitude and went out to meet my husband. We talked. He had believed that his wife was also made of “stainless steel.” That is why he had spoken to me as he did. It was good for him to discover, and I reiterated it to him, that she was flesh and blood.