The Tyranny of Isn’t

In 2014, the Stubblefield family was shaken to the core when their youngest, Katie, literally lost her face from a shotgun blast. To everyone’s astonishment, she survived the injury, but her wound was catastrophic. She was only 18.

Her father, Robb Stubblefield, recently wrote, “It seems like a lifetime ago…sitting in a trauma intensive care unit late at night…crying out in a muffled whispering of faith and heartache for God’s triumph to show itself…But here we are…having come so far.”

This family’s faith is nothing short of remarkable. Countless people are praying and supporting the Stubblefields and in turn have been touched by the grace of God themselves.

To date, very few face transplants have been attempted and succeeded. But last May at the Cleveland Clinic, Katie Stubblefield became the youngest recipient to receive a new face. Of course follow-up surgeries continue, and the risk of tissue rejection may require taking immunosuppressing drugs for the rest of her life. But hope abounds in this family.

Robb Stubblefield recently wrote on their Facebook page,

“A great man has said, ‘Occasionally weep deeply over the life you hoped would be. Grieve the losses. Then wash your face. Trust God and embrace the life you have.’”

Given what they’ve gone through, this statement leveled me. What am I complaining about these days? Still, life is messy, and we’re all going through some kind of struggle.

The troubling part is the human tendency to form, as Ann Voskamp aptly put—“habits of discontent.” And therefore, what is beautiful, glorious, breathtaking, hopeful, and sublime is overshadowed by what isn’t.

Melissa Helser, a worship leader with Bethel Music Collective, shared how her fourteen-year-old son prayed for a deaf man at a conference. The man was not healed, but the boy’s heartfelt prayer touched him deeply. The man’s interpreter approached Melissa to say she’d known the deaf man a long time and never had he been so affected. The tenderness in her boy’s prayer imparted some unseen grace. Later the son had a dream where Father God told him how proud He was about his prayer for the deaf man.

Helser’s story gave me pause. God obviously heard the boy’s prayer for healing, confirming it in a dream. God has the power to heal, but didn’t at that time. God was moved by the boy’s compassionate heart as if that was the greater gift to the deaf man.

Do we miss glorious moments when we’re caught up in our insistence about That One Thing that isn’t right, isn’t fixed, or isn’t healed? Does That One Thing keep us separated from God?

“But you don’t understand what I’m up against!” Some might say.

I have a friend who gave birth to a beautiful Downs Syndrome baby girl. Her husband left her soon after, and she returned home to care for her Alzheimers-stricken mother. That’s three very hard things all at once. “At least I’m not in Afghanistan!” she wrote in a letter. Do you wonder about people like that? She must’ve found a wellspring in her desert.

Author Ann Voskamp lived her entire childhood shrouded in sorrow, yet Ann recovered her hope in adulthood by writing out a thousand things she felt thankful for. Her book, One Thousand Gifts, recounts the story. She wrote:

“What will a life magnify? The world’s stress cracks, the grubbiness of a day, all that is wholly wrong and terribly busted? Or God? God is not in need of magnifying by us…but the reverse. I say thanks and I swell with Him, and I swell the world and He stirs me, joy all afoot. This, I think…is the other side of prayer. This act of naming grace moments, this list of God’s gifts moves beyond the shopping list variety of prayer and into the other side. The other side of prayer, the interior of His throne room, the inner walls of His powerful, love-beating heart.”[i]

If you’re in a dark struggle today, the important question is this: Have you succumbed to habits of discontent? Are you living under the tyranny of what isn’t, instead of the grace of what is?

Consider the faith behind this verse…

“Though the fig tree may not blossom, nor fruit be on the vines; though the labor of the olive may fail, and the fields yield no food; though the flock may be cut off from the fold, and there be no herd in the stalls—yet—I will rejoice in the Lord, I will joy in the God of my salvation.”   –Hebrews 3:17-18 (emphasis mine)

Find God in the mess. The Stubblefields are a shining, living example. Gratitude is about seeing what is good and embracing the life you have.

And as Ann Voskamp says, giving thanks always precedes the miracle.

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[i] Selections from One Thousand Gifts, by Ann Voskamp. Pg. 38.