Have your nightmares ever come true?

One of our boys developed a seizure disorder last year. No parent should ever witness their child going through a grand mal seizure. The agonizing minutes of convulsions and images that you wish you did not have to see over and over again, even when you close your eyes. Especially, when you close your eyes.

It’s a broken, broken world. One day you think you are overwhelmed with the laundry and dishes and spilling-over calendar. The next, every moment brimmed with the anxiety of ‘is he going down the stairs like a dinosaur because he is an eleven-year-old boy, or is he having a seizure?’

Have your nightmares ever come true?

It’s odd. Here we are, aren’t we?  

Broken and aching and wrestling. With grief and anxiety and a labyrinth of layered trauma. Waking up yet again to another day knowing full well, that though you are telling yourself to stop being paranoid at every little un-natural noise, you also know full well that… your fears do come true. 

There is a way that this pain frees you. It frees you from the clutches of ‘even then’. The fear that lurks in the unknown of I-don’t-know-if-I-can-survive-that. When that becomes your reality, you realize you are surviving it. Maybe scarred. For sure, scarred.

Yet, holding on to truths you knew…but now, you know deeper. Simple truths.

That the best things in life are not even things.

That there are more blessings around you than you had eyes to see. The embrace of a child. The look of your spouse that speaks more than the vocabulary of a thousand languages. The bond you did not know you needed with a parent that has walked this same dark valley, ‘I see you. I know’.

And woven through it all the voice of the lamb himself, telling you, ‘Come. Cast your burden on me. I will give you rest.’

This ‘rest’ looks different than before though. It’s not the kind of rest you get when you finally decide to let go of a self-imposed burden you have been carrying foolishly for no good reason.

It’s the kind of rest you get when you know this burden is very much your burden to carry.

And it might crush you.
Actually, it certainly will crush you.
Also. In the process remake you.
Teach you that when you are weak, He is strong.

Even if, your nightmares come true.
Especially then.