Walk By Faith, Not By Sight

I saw my mother walk into my hospital room one night. It was dark but I could see it was her. She didn't even look at me. She just marched on through to the next bed behind the curtain to my right. She stayed there for quite a while and so i figured perhaps she was tired and decided to take a nap in that empty Intensive Care Unit bed. It was so unlike my mother to ignore me in that manner. Here I was her only daughter who had just endured three back surgeries within the past week and she didn't act like she cared. After what seemed like an hour I became concerned. I started to yell, "Mom, Mom!" There was no answer. I kept screaming for her in hopes of waking her out of whatever deep sleep she was in. There was still no reply. I began to panic. Maybe she had gotten up and left without me even noticing. Could it be possible that even with my eyes wide open I missed her? I can't even describe the deep loneliness I felt that night with machines monitoring my every heart beat and I.V.'s running through both arms and my neck. The tears started streaming as I realized something was wrong. My mind just couldn't pull itself together to figure it out.

Days later when the heavy medication had wore off and I had caught up on the three nights of sleep i had missed, I realized I had been hallucinating. My mother didn't walk through my room that night. Yes my eyes were wide open but there was no curtain or even a bed on the other side. I was in a room all to myself. My brain had just been so diluted with pain medication and my body broken from fighting for its life that I was seeing things. Everything looked so real and even today I can remember what I saw that night in detail. The truth was my mother loved me and she would never ignore me. She knew how much I needed her at that moment and she would never intentionally hurt me that way.

Sometimes when we are going through a dark place in our lives the enemy will try and make us believe that God doesn't care. We call out to the Lord in prayer but we don't hear an answer. Our emotions can overcome us and we start to believe that God is ignoring us. How could He leave us all alone? Our minds are so diluted with the cares of this life that we start to think things that aren't true. Often it isn't until we come out of a trial that we can see that His word hasn't changed. "He will never leave you nor forsake you"... When morning breaks we then see that the one set of footprints in the sand where when God carried us. Just like my mother would never act like she didn't know me, I know my heavenly Father would never wouldn't pass me by either. We can't panic when things aren't going our way. When we can't see God working in our situations we still have to just trust Him! His promises do not change no matter what we may see with our mortal eyes. "We walk by faith and not by sight"...