I did not realize that I actually hated these two things on April 20th of this year, or last year, or the year before that.
The two things that I learned that I hated on April 20th relate to April 20, 2016.
In fact, the story does not even start then. This story begins in the summer of 2015 and it has nothing to do with Louisville KY, where or family currently resides.
These lessons that I learned on one April 20th have their roots in Hanover, Germany and Petah Tikvah, Israel.
The current pandemic got me thinking once again about these two things that I once hated on this past April 20th.
In August 2015, I was invited to Hanover, Germany to perform a wedding of a German couple that had met in our congregation while they were living in Israel. At 36 years old, I was the old guy of this group of college-aged friends. After the rehearsal, and final preparations, the wedding came and went without a glitch. Since it was my first time in Germany, I wanted to spend a few more days in the country sight-seeing and spending time with my other German friends who had attended the wedding.
On the second to last night in Hanover, I was in bed dozing off when my phone began buzzing. It was quite late and so I was shocked to see that the messages were from my wife Gaby who was still in Israel awaiting my return. In the conversation that followed, Gaby shared with me that she had recently taken a pregnancy test, and the that test had come back positive. She had been waiting until I returned home from Germany to tell me the good news. However over the previous few days, Gaby had started experiencing the signs of a miscarriage.
Conception had been eluding us for a couple of years. Now, this.
I needed to get home. I needed to be by her side. I needed to take care of her.
Only, I could not get back to Israel. I could not be by her side. I was in Germany and it was the middle of the night. Feeling paralyzed, I did what I could do. I prayed a desperate prayer for God to preserve the life of our young baby and to care for Gaby in my absence. I eventually dozed off into a semiconscious night of unrest.
I hated having to pray this desperate prayer. I hated everything about being forced to ask God to take control of the situation and save the life of our little baby when I wanted to take control of the situation and save the life of our little baby.
After speaking with Gaby the next morning, we feared the worst and determined that Gaby needed to go to the hospital. It was a Friday morning which means that the weekend had already started in Israel for most people. I attempted to contact several women from our congregation to ask them to take Gaby to the emergency room, but surprisingly no one picked up the phone.
I felt so powerless. There I was in Germany while my wife was on another continent needing medical attention to potentially save the life of the baby that we had been hoping for.
“Maybe Dinah would pick up,” I thought to myself. I picked up the phone and tried to call.
Dinah did not answer.
Still desperate, I called Dinah’s husband, Dan. I caught him at the pool in Petah Tikvah, enjoying the weekend with his children.
“Bro, where is Dinah?”
“She is busy man. What’s up?”
“I need Dinah, bro! Ugh”
I did not want to go into this situation with Dan. Dan was a great friend—a Christian “brother.” We served as elders together in our congregation. However, I did not think I needed him. I just needed to find one of Gaby’s friends to take her to the hospital. I did not need Dan. I needed his wife Dinah.
“What do you need man?!” Dan repeated. He raised his voice in a way that only good friends can do to each other without offending or being offended. I assume that he could sense the tension in my voice and maybe, even, the frantic sentiments that I was trying to hide.
Something broke inside of me at that point. I guess the situation was acceptable to me when I was able to frame it as Gaby needing help. However, I did not want it to appear as if I actually needed help. I hated being in a situation in which I need to ask other people for help.
But when Dan raised his voice and urged me to talk, I realized that I could not control this situation. I needed help from my Christian “brother.”
I broke down and told Dan that I needed some help. I needed someone to help me care for Gaby, our 4-year-old son, and the most vulnerable member of our family—our new little baby.
“I am going to go get her right now.” Dan immediately said upon hearing the situation.
“Bro… you don’t… you are with your children…” I feebly attempted to resist.
Dan dismissed my attempt at courtesy and developed a plan.
“ Praying desperate prayers is admitting that we need God to help us be fine with being powerless and trust that he is in control.”
“I will pick your son up and drop him off at my house with my children. Yael will take care of them.”
Yael was Dan’s 14-year-old-daughter. Dan did everything according to his plan. He then spent the afternoon through the late night with Gaby in an Israeli hospital in Bnei Barak.
In that hospital, Dan cared for my distraught wife, Gaby, and our little baby as medical doctors conducted the most personal and private exams. Dan displayed a type of care for my family that transcends words like “friendship” and is much better defined by the term, “family.”
You see, I always heard Christians refer to each other as “family,” but I had never seen this family characterized through such a commitment to our well-being by someone that was not a blood relative. Dan showed me that Christians are a family that is stronger than our own blood because we are united by Jesus’ blood. Jesus’s blood is the primary example of how we are to treat one another in his family—being willing to sacrifice all earthly commodities and comforts for the sake of others. Dan demonstrated this by literally being willing to do whatever it took to help our family out that day.
But I hated the fact that I was forced to ask for help.
Dan showed me how Christians actually imitate Jesus on that August day. It turns out that I actually needed Dan more than I thought. I not only needed his help, but I needed to learn from his Christian example.
Through these tests, it was confirmed that Gaby was indeed pregnant, but that our little baby was not developing as the medical doctors might expect. After a series of exams over the next few weeks, the doctors cautiously stated that there was a chance that our baby would live, but they were not particularly optimistic. Several doctors simply advised to wait things out. Only by waiting would we be able to know if our baby would survive.
During the time between receiving the doctors’ opinions and Gaby’s next ultrasound, we learned to pray desperate prayers. We learned about what it was like to be completely powerless in a situation that we wanted to control so badly. I remember my desperate prayer that I repeated over and over in these couple of weeks: “Lord, please—please, God, please—give us the opportunity to meet our child. Please God. Please.”
The desperate prayers that I hated so much helped us work through this situation. Our desperate prayers were our most authentic prayers. They were prayers that expressed our admission that we could not control our own circumstances. They were prayers that helped us recognize who we were in the face of an almighty all-knowing God. They were prayers that taught us how to be willing to accept God’s will when it might be contrary to what we think is best.
Our family has been praying some desperate prayers once again lately. We look at our current pandemic and realize that there is nothing we can do to control what is going on around us. Almost everyone that we know has either been personally affected or has a friend or loved one that has been afflicted by the virus.
We have been praying desperate prayers for these people.
Some have lost their livelihood because of the current pandemic and there is absolutely nothing that can be done about it. We have no clue when this will end. No one has any idea if we will ever get any definitive answers as to how this started or why this is happening. At this juncture, we are forced to wait things out and trust God that the current situation will eventually change. In times like this, it is natural to feel helpless because we cannot control the situation.
But we can pray.
We can pray desperate prayers confessing our lack of omniscience and omnipotence. Through praying like this, we implicitly recognize the greatness of God. We also admit our inability to consistently grasp the divine purposes in difficult situations because of the limitations of our human nature.
As we open our eyes from our prayers, we deal with the reality that our current situations may not change. We recognize that we may never receive an explanation for our hardship (i.e., Job).
Prayer isn’t magic.
But prayer does help us recognize our proper disposition of humility before God which serves as a starting place to work through our current difficulties. Praying desperate prayers is admitting that we need God to help us be fine with being powerless and trust that he is in control.
At some point in September 2015, I accompanied Gaby to yet another ultrasound appointment. I could tell that Gaby was physically exhausted as a result of the numerous tests throughout the preceding weeks. We were both emotionally fatigued. At this point, we just needed some clarity concerning the situation.
The Lord provided the clarity that we needed upon us seeing a heartbeat pulsating on the ultrasound monitor.
Yael holding Yael
On April 20, 2016 our little baby girl was born in St. Joseph’s hospital in East Jerusalem. We named our daughter Yael, after Dan and Dinah’s daughter Yael, who cared for our son while her father accompanied Gaby to the hospital during those crucial early moments of our baby’s life.
This past April 20th, I was reminded of how much Dan’s actions were also crucial for me in terms of my own spiritual formation. Dan’s example helped me realize that these two things that I hated—praying desperate prayers and asking for help from the body of Christ—were things that I needed to learn how to do.
April 20th reminds me of how much I need to approach God with a proper disposition of humility concerning personal circumstances that I want to control.
April 20th reminds me of how much I need to ask for help in times of weakness so that I might be blessed to see how God works in and through his people to serve one another.
April 20th reminds me of how little I control my own life circumstances and how needy I actually am.
Yair (9) and Yael who turned 4-years-old on April 20th