The weather has given way to wind and rain tonight, and I’m listening to Jocelyn singing “You Are My Sunshine” to Julia up in the nursery. The house is quiet after the flurry of activity that comes with trash night and a run to Target and I’m thinking back to where I was a month ago.
Right around this time, I was peering through the plastic of an oxygen tent at my newborn daughter – the NICU staff working quietly around me as I stared in disbelief. My wife was recovering from an emergency caesarean a floor above. And I wondered in awe as I watched her sleep, what surprises lay in the days ahead.
There have been surprises and challenges in the last month, but tonight we celebrate a month that Julia Paige Cook has drawn breath on this earth. And we thank God and our community and family for it all.
So why is the picture of the stone? I see it as the intersection of ancient reminders of God’s presence and an interesting happenstance while we were on vacation in Greece this summer.
My sister, Lauren, is not much of a deep water swimmer, preferring to chum along the shore with her snorkel and mask looking for interesting stones to add to her collection. I have seen her come out of the water laden down with more than she can carry. So, ever the pragmatist, she most often tucks them into her bathing suit as she swims to take full advantage of the time in the water. A gifted artist, she has gone to great lengths to incorporate her finds into the tile work of their villa.
Jocelyn and I had been on the island for a couple of days; and the care and stress of Julia’s diagnosis was beginning to melt away a little. During an evening swim at a secluded beach, Lauren popped up between us and showed us some of her finds. Jocelyn’s eyes fell upon a green stone with a stripe of marble running through it, and without missing a beat, said, “That’s Julia’s heart!”
Interesting. It had the distinctive shape, and the marble stripe ran right where the wall separating the left and right chambers of the heart might have been. It was a strong line, and a reminder of what to pray for regarding Julia’s heart, which by then we had been told had complications.
Before our vacation, we had spent an evening at a friend’s home with the British evangelist J.John, who is a firm believer that God can move in the present day just as he did in the Bible. His challenge to us that night was to pray for Julia’s wholeness, despite everything that medical science was telling us. And when Julia was born, we would have more clarity on what specifically to pray for. So for the rest of the summer, we used my sister’s gracious gift as the focus of our prayers: “Please, God. Make our child whole. Repair the breach in her heart and let her live.”
It turns out that Julia still has a heart defect; and the stone still sits on the sill of our kitchen window. But instead of a reminder of promises unmet, its meaning has changed and deepened as our experience has formed us.
Its roots take Jocelyn and I back to a time long past with a nation doing its best to follow a Deliverer God with a name no one dared speak out loud. They gathered and asked their priest, Samuel, to intercede with God on their behalf. Enemies learned of the gathering and raised an army bent on genocide, and God swept them aside with heaven-sent thunder. And as the old Hebrew story goes,
“…Samuel took a stone and set it up between Mizpah and Shen. He named it Ebenezer, saying, ‘Thus far has the LORD helped us.'”
Ebenezer – a stone of God-sent help. When God did something memorable in Israel, they would often raise a stone of remembrance, so that in the darker days of the future there would always be a reminder that God would be there – even when it didn’t feel like it.
The good news from the Cook family is that Julia is responding well to the medications and her breathing is more comfortable. She is gaining weight, even with the fluid loss caused by the medication. We have our first consult with the surgical team at Children’s Hospital tomorrow, and we may even set a tentative date for the procedure. Complications notwithstanding, the countdown begins tomorrow.
There are times as we consider Julia’s condition that it feels like we have been forsaken and the fears of going it alone overtake us. But the marble striped stone stays on our window sill as a reminder that thus far, the LORD has helped us. We celebrate that tonight on our daughter’s one-month birthday.