What Do You Do in a Hard Place?

What do you do in a Hard Place, when you discover yourself in the meanwhile of your life, waiting for God to show up? Taken from Under a Desert Sky: Redefining Hope, Beauty, and Faith in the Hardest Places:

“We’ve reached the hard place in your dad’s cancer,” Mom tells me on the phone, repeating the words from the doctor.

Several lung tumors are no longer responding to treatment, so Dad has been taken off the clinical trial. Precise radiation is scheduled to target two tumors in his left lung. The tumors are in troublesome places—close to an airway and a major blood vessel.

A Troublesome Place. A Hard Place.

The hospital constructs a blue canoe-like container for Dad to receive treatment. The technicians cover him in a plastic-wrap material and suck the air out, encasing Dad in a body bag to keep him immovable. Only his head is free. They cannot wrap up his jokes and laughter.

A friend writes, “God is holding your dad in the palm of His hand.”

My sister, Renae, says, “I think it’s a blue cocoon and Dad is going to go through metamorphosis and come out a new creation.”

We could use life-giving changes in The Hard Place.

Maybe Hard Places allow God to take what is worm-like in us and give us wings to soar. Maybe in the dark, hidden places, a transformation is happening. A place where He performs personal resurrections. Where He brings peace we can’t explain, but the peace is more real than the waves that rock us.

I can relate to the disciples who screamed for help in a storm in the middle of a sea (Matthew 14:22-33). After feeding the 5000, Jesus had sent them on their way across the water without him. The trip probably started easily enough, with jokes and recollections of picking up the leftovers and who had consumed the most fish and bread. Their hearts were full of seeing the miracle.

Fishermen are storytellers by trade, but I don’t imagine there was any talk in the boat of the one that got away. Because it didn’t get away. Hadn’t they seen it with their own eyes? Two fish and a handful of loaves had fed 5000 people!

In their excitement, the disciples paid no attention to the approaching thunderclouds that blotted out the sun. Or to the descending black gloom that hung, suspended above them…waiting. Like a stick of dynamite with the fuse finally lit, the clouds exploded with rain. Drenching, soaking rain. Not only rain, but wind heaved the boat from side to side.

The disciples had hit a meanwhile.

“Meanwhile, the boat was far out to sea when the wind came up against them and they were battered by the waves” (Matthew 14:24 MSG).

Battered. For men who had made their living on this very sea, it wasn’t a minor squall. It was a storm of gargantuan proportions.

The disciples were simply traveling from point A to point B, minding their own business, coming from a place of easy water, when they hit a storm.

We regularly hit meanwhiles.

Meanwhile the air conditioner is broken, the car payment is overdue, and you fear your husband wants a divorce. Meanwhile the washing machine quit mid-cycle, your best friend isn’t speaking to you, and your teenager is failing classes. Meanwhile the car has a flat tire, the chicken soup boiled over on the stove, and your house was robbed while you ran to the grocery store.

Meanwhile … my dad rides in his blue canoe because he has reached a hard place with his cancer.

Meanwhile … I find myself in a place where circumstances have wrapped so tightly that the air has been completely sucked out and I am unable to move.

Meanwhile.

Storms are forgetting places. Of answered prayers. Of past provision. Of past faithfulness. Of past goodness.

Are there other lessons I can learn in the story? What did Jesus do?

Right after the miracle, He sent the crowds away, had His disciples get in a boat without Him, and He climbed a mountain to pray. Alone. After a day of hard work, of being surrounded by people on every side, Jesus made time to step away and spend time alone with His Father.

Jesus knew the discipline was vital, as essential as water.

Without the daily practice of drinking deeply from the heart of God in the times of easy water, I will be like the disciples who did not recognize Jesus coming to them in the middle of the storm, who did not know their own dear friend.

“When my prayer life suffers, my ability to trust God during the storms of life also suffers. If I wait until I think I have time, I will never slip off to the quiet places. Thus, when the storms arrive, I look out through the turbulence and see only the ghost of God,” Macrina Wiederkehr writes.***

I look through the turbulence and see only the ghost of God.

The disciples thought Jesus was a ghost out there in the storm. A ghost. Something dead from the past. A long ago memory. Nobody with power or answers to help them.In the middle of a storm, a memory, a ghost of a relationship won’t help me. The disciples found this to be true. In the middle of their meanwhile, in their terror, they cried out for help from a friend, only to discover He was God.*** 

***Macrina Wiederkehr,  Abide: Keeping Vigil with the Word of God (Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 2011), 91-92

**Adapted from Lynne Hartke, Under a Desert Sky: Redefining Hope, Beauty, and Faith in the Hardest Places, (Grand Rapids: Revel, a division of Baker Publishing Group, 2017), 64-68.