Lent Daily Devotion
Friday, February 23 2007

So many times we go through life wondering where God is. I'm guilty of it, and I know most of you who are reading this are guilty of it as well. It seems as if we have no trouble believing in God when the circumstances in our lives are going the way in which we planned them to go, but when we encounter different storms in life, we tend to blame God and wonder where exactly he is.

In the Scripture passage, we hear St. Stephen preach and proclaim that even Israelites, God's faithful people, with whom God promised to be always, turned their backs on God when things were not going as they planned. They couldn't put their faith in God and trust that God would provide. They were so worried about themselves that they forgot who led them out of Egypt and who promised to lead them to the promise land.

Through Lent, we are encouraged to look at our own life and our own mortality. When those ashes are put onto our foreheads, we are told, "From dust you came and to dust you shall return." These few words remind us our lives can change in an instant.

This past summer, I was admitted to hospital with unknown stomach pains. After spending a couple days in the hospital and only getting worse, the doctors decided that it would be much safer to move me to the ICU. Shortly after being transferred to the ICU, I was sent down to have a CT Scan. While down there, I went into a total organ shut down. They raced me back upstairs to my room, put a tube down my throat so I could breath and, luckily, were able to start my heart again. At the age of 21, you don't ever expect to be lying in the ICU with a tube down your throat.

After having a doctor at that hospital tell my family "there is no hope," they transferred me to a large regional medical center, where I spent about two weeks on the Medical Intensive Care Unit (otherwise known as the MICU), a week and a half on the Cardiac ICU unit because my heart was severely damaged, and just a few days in a step-down unit. The first week in the MICU was touch and go.

I almost didn't make it out of there, but somehow I did - and I believe that it was Christ alone that brought me though. You see, the doctors at the medical center never could determine what went wrong, and that is pretty crucial in treating someone. I believe it was simply the miracle of prayer that brought me through. To this day, and it's been about seven months since it all happened, people come up to me and tell me that they were praying for me and they are so happy to see that I'm alive. Some nights, when I was in pain and didn't think I was going to make it or even wanted to make it, there was always that voice telling me to keep strong. I believe and I know God was with me; he was next to me in that very hospital bed, enduring everything that I was enduring, telling me, "If I can do this, I know you can." He was in all the people that came to visit me, those who lived right around the corner and those who live hours away. He was there in the midst of my greatest pain and suffering.

If there is one thing that you take away from your Lenten journey, take this: God will never abandon you, nor will he ever stop loving you. He never stopped loving the Israelites and continued to love them by sending his only Son to die on a cross. For the greatest love the world has ever seen was when a man named Jesus willing went to the cross of Calvary, stretched out his hands, and died for all our sins. Let this then be the promise you accept today: that God will never abandon you, and he will always, always love you.