March 29, 2018 went much differently than I had expected…
Bec and I were at the hospital expecting our daughter Anna, everything was going as planned, until it wasn’t.
The first time I saw my daughter her face was completely blue, the umbilical cord was around her neck and had cut off her oxygen supply through the birth canal. Where I expected to hear the sound of a crying infant and cheers from the doctors and nurses had been replaced with an eerie silence.
Unfortunately I had gotten used to eerie silences…
I’ve been the volunteer chaplain for my local sheriff since the summer of 2013, sometimes that involves some pretty intense situations. Leading up to the birth of my daughter I’d experience an unusual chain of difficult events.
A call to a mother to let her know her son was tragically killed in an accident… eerie silence.
Waiting to for a father and mother to arrive to explain their teenage son had taken his life at their home…eerie silence.
Watching a World War 2 era navy plane crash on a runway and being the first under the flipped plane to cut the pilot and his unconscious wife out of their harness as they hung upside down…eerie silence.
These kind of things have a way of building up pressure, not the kind you can see, the kind that puts stress on your mind. Without warning all at once it breaks loose, and then…eerie silence. You feel completely alone and you lose the joy for things that once gave your life purpose.
Beautiful Mess springs from that place in my life. Thanks to God, and the loving people he put around me I was able to come out of that space, I was able to breathe again. Each day would get a little brighter than the next.
You see my daughter Anna in the middle of the silence was held in the hands of an expert physician whose skilled hands would remove the obstruction that constricted her airway, then I would hear the most beautiful sound – a babies cry.
Each day I watched her grow I grew as well – I was in the hands of the Great Physician who tenderly held me in His hands and removed the obstructions so I could “breath again”.
Life can be messy, riddled with unanswerable questions, but it never ceases to be beautiful.
Listen to “Beautiful Mess” here
“When Jesus heard it, he saith unto them, They that are whole have no need of the physician, but they that are sick: I came not to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance.” (Mark 2:17)
Josh Cehulik 