There's No Place Like It... part 6

Sometimes I dream about being a hero.  You know, showing up at the nick of time, saving some person, or better yet, a mob of people in distress.  Somehow I can slow time down to move Matrix-like faster than a bullet to defend them from an ill-fated injustice.  Then, I'm slapped in the face with the reality of the situation that I have no cape, no alter ego, and definitely no superpowers.  Take, for instance, my return to Australia.

My flight from Dallas left at 10:30 p.m.  As we lifted above the clouds for the last time over the United States I looked through a brown haze at the Dallas City lights disgusted by the amount of smog that we breathe in constantly without even knowing it.  I wish I had the super sucking power where I could take a deep breath and inhale all the air pollution in the world and eject it into space.  Super sucking power.  That's funny.  When I play basketball, I think I do have that superpower.

So anyway... (that's how my Grandma Matthias makes a transition to a new thought.  I like it)... I had sixteen hours and five minutes dream about the reunion between my family and me.  As I attempted to crane my neck to fall asleep for some of those hours, I manipulated my conscious dream to something like this:  Christine and the girls stood at the sliding doors from customs, posterboards in hand proclaiming, "Welcome home, Daddy.  You're the most amazing human being in the world.  We're so lucky to have you."  Christine would drop everything she had, purse, camera, phone and rush to me past security guards, throw herself into my arms, lock her legs around my waist and give me the deepest kiss the world has ever known.  I would stand there like a hero, thick, muscular legs firmly planted in the ground accepting my wife's embraces feeling the adoring gazes of my young daughters welcoming their conquering hero home.

That's how I fell asleep probably somewhere over Las Vegas.

My real dreams circled and swirled around the previous two weeks.  Fishing was an amazing experience, but one of the most profound things I've ever encountered occurred on a Wednesday afternoon. 

The sun sinks later in the northern hemisphere in late July.  Casting a sprinkled frosting over the small rivulets, the sun showed us the direction to our late afternoon fishing opportunity.  We'd stopped at the cabin; after a hard day of fighting Esox, we enjoyed a libation and a few games of horseshoes with the relatives.  Then, with calm water beckoning, Vikki and journeyed down to the boat, giant fishing net in hand to head out for a few more hours of trolling for bass.  Vikki's eyes looked alive; perhaps it was the fact that she gotten more sleep in two days then she probably had in eight months.

Vikki and her husband, Cliff, were blessed with their second daughter in January.  Jovie was born almost three months premature:  two pounds two ounces and when the pictures came through of her tiny little body, it was with amazement that we pondered the wonder of medical science.  But it was a miracle of God that Jovie was born at all.  I truly mean that; there are certain people that find miracles everywhere, but I tend to be a little more miracle-selective.  Jovie is a miracle and the more people that I tell her story, the more they agree.

In December, I got a phone call from my brother.  A real live phone call from America, not Skype, or text but the phone rang with a  number from Nebraska.  My brother had called to tell me that Vikki had gone to the hospital because her waters had broken.  Because Vikki wasn't due until April, the doctors (as the story was relayed to me) told her that she was going to lose the baby and that she should prepare for that eventuality.  As Vikki later retold the story, she said she could feel Jovie still moving; the horror of Jovie's struggle was unimaginable.  With little sensitivity, the doctor said that when the waters break, the baby loses her home and because Jovie was only twenty weeks into her development, in medicine's eyes she wasn't a 'viable' birth yet.  The doctor told Vikki and Cliff all sorts of things, none of them particularly positive.  So when my brother called to relay the message he had four words to say.

"It's time to pray."

It was night time when I received the call and I imagined Vikki in the hospital bed, wrecked by the news that her almost forty-year old body couldn't make it up the last hill of pregnancy.  So, as I lay there in bed, I stretched out my hand all the way to the northeast, over the city of Brisbane, across the Pacific Ocean, past Fiji and the Solomon Islands, Hawaii and the western part of the continental United States and I prayed harder than I ever have in my life.  I didn't really know what to pray for because praying that the baby would be born healthy seemed like such a imaginatory figment; so I prayed for Vikki and Cliff that somehow God's love would be shown in their lives.  For fifteen minutes I lay prone on the bed, one arm pointed out the window, and I was sure that there were a lot of other hands stretched out in the direction of Cedar Rapids also.

I don't know how prayer works.  I wish I did so I could get it right every time but it seems like prayer is facilitated when we are not praying for ourselves and our own wants and desires (not that it is wrong) but when we pray for God's power to be shown, you never know what might happen.  It just so happened on that cold December night, the miracle that we only could have hoped for, like looking up just at the right time to see a shooting star, happened.  For some odd reason, Vikki's labor stopped.  When the doctor came in to see her, she was perplexed.  These things just don't happen and even as the waters closed up the doctor tried to get Vikki and Cliff 'to see the reality of the situation' which is doctor speak for 'the baby, even if it makes it, will probably have severe 'difficulties' and we should think about other options also.'  I can only imagine how much this enraged Vikki and she isn't one to give up very easily.  So Vikki laid very still for a few nights but then the hospital had to send her home.  Insurance wouldn't pay for an extended hospital stay until the baby was at least twenty-two weeks. 

For those fourteen days, we waited and stretched out our hands every night hoping against hope and now praying for that 'one percent' chance to be Vikki and Cliff's.  Stillness in Vikki's life... for two weeks... she made it; I don't know how she did it, in constant wonder that if she moved to quickly in a certain way or sneezed too hard or whatever, that Jovie's one percent would turn to no percent.  But she made it.  They went back to the hospital where they were admitted and told the long shot odds.  Every day that she stayed in the hospital without having the baby was one more day that the baby could develop and overcome the odds of the medical world. 

Vikki and Jovie made it six more weeks.  That's forty-two days of idleness, of worry, of boring day time soap operas, of thousands of crosswords, of time away from Vikki and Cliff's oldest daughter, Paisley.  That's forty-two days of sitting still in a sterile room away from her husband and family.  My mother came to stay with the family for much of that time, but it was difficult, I think, for Vikki to be away from home. 

As the weeks passed, the nurses and doctors couldn't fathom how it was happening.  Surely when the baby was born the stress of the prematurity would create problems.

Through the difficulty of Jovie's pre-birth, the world had a chance to prepare for a new story; a new miracle.  Through the courage of the two youngish parents, Jovie was brought into the world albeit very small. 

But now, eight months later, there's a pretty cool little niece making pretty large messes in her diapers.

So Vikki and I were on the boat, listening to the small waves clap hands against the sides of the aluminum boat.  The wind whistled in the birch leaves.  No fish were biting, so I heard Vikki putting down her fishing rod.

"Hey Reid, why do you believe in God?"

I guess I wasn't ready for the question because it's usually a question that strangers ask me, or congregation members, or people that I don't live with who could be easy to escape from.  Families don't often talk about faith.  Why?  I don't know.  That's just the way it's always been.  We don't talk about the important stuff in case we don't get it right.  Or, we don't want to offend the ones we are closest to.  I should be used to the question, but at that moment, I didn't really know the right words to say. 

"I guess I believe because something inside me tells me that I can't understand why the world is the way it is without having a purpose.  I suppose that's kind of avoiding the question, but every time I try to think of the world as just a meaningless orb floating in the middle of space I can't reconcile it with the way I feel about other humans.  Why is there love?  It can't all be evolutionary results, can it?  Why is there caring and hope?  Why is there sunshine and reason?  Why can we think? Why do I have a little voice inside my head that flicks my inner ear when I do the wrong thing?" 

I was blathering on about anything that came to mind but I continued fishing so that I had something to do with my hands. 

"You know, Reid, I didn't pray at all when I was in the hospital.  I couldn't."

"Why not?"  Now I was looking at her.  Vikki's got really cool eyes - greenish, with gold flecks in them, kind of leonine. 

She paused a moment and said one of the most profound things I'd ever heard.  "I didn't want one more reason not to believe in God."

I asked her if I could write this and it seems to me that Jovie's story has to be told, but so does Vikki's.  She'd had a hard ten years up until meeting Cliff, and now that life had turned around, it seemed as if God was working on that family also.

One more reason not to believe in God.  How about that?  That sounds like about ninety percent of the people I meet.  We're all looking for reasons not to believe - me included - because it's just too incredible to believe that there is a God that cares.  And even in the midst of tragedy, because not everyone gets to experience a miracle like Jovie, we find that God sends people to help them in that time of struggle. 

At the end of my time in the United States, Jovie was baptized.  I got to sing a song I wrote (one hour before) at the baptism.  Sometimes the Spirit works quickly.  As I sat on the floor, singing the song, Paisley and Jovie were in the same room. Jovie's intense blue eyes stared at me while I was singing and it felt as if God was staring at me - not that Jovie is God, but that somehow living miracles have a strength in them that we can never understand or begin to comprehend.  I had to look away from her.  But not at the baptism.  She did a good job of messing her pants there too.

My brother Ryan did the baptism; my sister Dani was a sponsor.  A whole world was proud of this youngish family.  It was a beautiful moment in the life of God's family.

I woke up from my sleep on the airplane.  After dreaming about the baptism, we had neared Brisbane.  I had slept on and off for the night intermittently watching movies through bleary eyes.  I turned off the screen when we landed and prepared for my 'hero worship' when I arrived.  Just like the family gazed at Jovie the last weekend, so I was prepared for my own dream to come true:  the girls with their posters, the long loving kiss... you remember.

I grabbed my bags and exited customs at 5:30 in the morning.  I was already wearing the smile on my face.  As the doors opened in front of me, I scanned the crowd. 

No Matthias girls.  No Christine.  Oh well, they were probably held up a little bit.  Or maybe they're hiding.  Greta likes to do that.

Parking my trolley and bags, I stood aside and looked at my iPad.  5:45.  I had no way of contacting Christine to see when she would arrive.  So I waited.  This was not part of the hero dream.  The victorious night always has the damsel arrive right on time.  6:30.  Okay, now I was getting worried.  I was past being bothered that they hadn't showed up on time; now I was beginning to think that Christine was going to get someone else to pick me up.

6:45.  I was looking at sports scores when the doors opened and the girls came rushing in.  They gave me huge hugs and told me they loved me and missed me.  Their posters were in the car, but boy were they tired.  And, they had to get up so early, there was traffic.  My heroic reentry to the country was not perfect, but there was still my lovely wife.  As we pulled the trolley outside, there she was hurriedly adjusting school bags to allow for my two large cases.  She smiled gave me a huge lingering squeeze, a strange look and a peck on the lips.  No large, lingering, wet kiss for this jet lagged traveler. 

We got in the car and began to drive away.  Christine reached into the console.

"Here's a tissue."  I looked in the visor mirror.

I had a large booger hanging from my nose.

What a hero.