The Crossing

At sixty-one, I was told my kidneys were failing. And I did what I have always done when the ground gives way under me. A life like mine leaves a person no other choice. I dealt with it. I handled it. And I asked God for the one thing no doctor could put on a chart: His supernatural help, and His direction. That is how it all started.

The full account of that season is in my memoir. What I want to preach about here is not the diagnosis. It is the crossing, because that is the part almost nobody explains to people, and it is where most of the suffering actually happens.

There is a before, and there is an after. For you, maybe the thing that divided them was a diagnosis. Or a job loss. Or a betrayal. Or a death you never saw coming. But here is what nobody tells you, and it is the whole point of this teaching: The crossing does not happen all at once.

You do not absorb the full weight of it in one moment. You understand it slowly. Over days. Over weeks. Over months. And with each new piece of understanding, something inside you has to adjust again. You have to let go of a future you were expecting. You have to build a relationship with a reality you did not choose.

Lamentations 3:22 says, it is of the Lord's mercies that we are not consumed, because his compassions fail not. They are new every morning. Not delivered in one enormous installment at the beginning that has to last you. Rationed daily, because that is exactly how the crossing gets made.

This is the same God who gave Israel manna in the wilderness one day at a time and told them not to store it up. Some of your panic is that you are trying to see whether you have enough grace for the next five years. You do not, and you were never meant to. You have enough for today, and there will be more in the morning.

Matthew 6:34 says, take therefore no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof. And Psalm 119:105 says thy word is a lamp unto my feet, and a light unto my path. A lamp at your feet lights the next step. It does not illuminate the highway. That is not God withholding. That is God giving you precisely enough to move.

Stop expecting yourself to handle this gracefully. It is disorienting, frightening, and entirely acceptable to be terrified. Psalm 56:3 says, what time I am afraid, I will trust in thee. He assumed the fear would come and made a plan for what to do inside it.

Handle what is in front of you. Nehemiah prayed to the God of heaven and set a watch. Both. So make the calls. Keep the appointments. Learn the vocabulary of the new world you are in. That is faith with its sleeves rolled up.

Ask for what no doctor can give. James 1:5 says if any of you lack wisdom, let him ask of God, that giveth to all men liberally. So ask for direction. Ask for peace that has no explanation. Ask for the strength to walk into a room you do not want to walk into.

Grieve the future you lost. Nobody acknowledges this loss because it never existed physically, but you had a future in your head, decorated, furnished, with people in it. That is a real loss, and it deserves real mourning. But do not bury the whole life. The old future ended. Your life did not.

Isaiah 43:19 says, behold, I will do a new thing; now it shall spring forth; shall ye not know it? I will even make a way in the wilderness, and rivers in the desert. In the wilderness. Not after the wilderness ends. God makes ways inside the place you did not want to be.