What does kill you makes you stronger: when death came near

It was Mother's Day weekend, 2023, and I was geared up for a weekend of fun. My plan was a business event Saturday morning, leaving in time to catch my daughter's soccer game and then an evening of my son's football game and then 24 hours of being celebrated for being the mom of this little circus we manage.

Within 5 minutes of arriving at my daughter's game, our 6 year old son fell off of the monkey bars and landed wrong on his arm. Sidenote: can someone please find out for me why the people who design playground equipment clearly have never watched a child play?! There is always a sheer drop off or hazard like 12 foot high monkey bars that create these scenarios. Rant over.

His arm was visibly broken so my husband helped load us up to drop us off at an urgent care nearby. He left us to then go get our other kids we had left at the soccer field but soon after he left, I realized that I did not have my phone just as the front desk manager let me know I would need to go to the ER to have his arm reset.

I broke down at that point because I didn't have a way to get to the hospital and Beck was in terrible pain. I know there are parents who see their children suffer often and I just can't imagine because it is the hardest thing to watch.

This amazing receptionist offered to drive us in her car! I'm fairly certain this was illegal but I will never forget her kindness in that moment. She loaded us up and we made the quick drive to the closest ER. His arm did have to be reset while he was sedated but we were so thankful that no surgery was necessary.

A dear friend picked us up about 3 hours later and drove us home since Dave had taken the other kids to their other sports activities for the day. I got Beck settled on the couch, his arm propped up carefully (still not in a cast because that comes after the swelling subsides).

All of a sudden, in his drowsy state, he asked, "Mom, is that a bird?"

I turned around and was horrified to see a huge, writhing, hissing bat right behind me on our living room rug. I jumped back but then realized that the thing was trying to fly and I thought it might fly into Beck on the couch. As I jumped in front of Beck, the disgusting creature flew into my shin and then crash landed in the kitchen.

I called Dave and he recalls me making "labor-like" noises while I attempted to catch the bat because I knew that it was acting bizarre and that it might have rabies.

I was able to trap it under a bin and call another dear friend who had been through a similar nightmare and she sent her husband right over to be with me until animal control arrived to take the bat away for testing.

The officer assured me that it was unlikely that the bat had rabies but that they would call me by Monday.

I called my doctor proactively and left a message since it was late Saturday. The on-call doctor called me on Sunday morning and told me I needed to go to the ER to get a rabies vaccine just in case the bat ended up testing positive.

So that was how I spent Mother's Day morning. At the ER, getting what turned out to be the WRONG initial vaccine to recieve. More on that later.

By Monday, we got the call from the sherrif's department that the bat had indeed tested positive for rabies and that all 6 of us needed to head to the ER to be evaluated.

What you might not know (or want to know) about bats with rabies is that they can bite or scratch without you knowing it (while you are asleep) and since we could not verify when the bat had entered the house (through a crack in the chimney), we had to take the precaution to have all 6 of us vaccinated since rabies has a 100 percent fatality rate and sounds like a horrendous way to go!

The shots were wildly expensive ($35k for a family of 6), painful, made us feel awful, had to be administered at the ER with no appointment so you can imagine what that was like to be in the ER surrounded by ill people every few days with kids dreading shots.

And one of the worst parts of the ordeal was that I had a lot of fear because of not receiving the correct vaccine within the 24 hour window that is recommended. No one could definitively tell me that I had received the correct vaccine in time. The doctors weren't overly alarmed about it but they weren't very re-assuring either.

The next few weeks were just tough.

Our house felt gross and I kept replaying the trauma of that day.

It was hard to spend the money and the time necessary to follow the doctor's orders.

The fear I felt made me feel obsessive in my mind and exhausted in my body.

The whole thing just felt like an unnecessary and even kind of mean thing for God to allow to happen.

So I told Him that.

And this doesn't happen all of the time...often God speaks through His word, reminders from others and gentle nudges of conviction...but sometimes it feels like I sense exactly what He wants me to know.

"Lauren, you feel like I'm trying to kill you, but I'm actually trying to save you"

And that's when it hit me.

I have been plagued off and on by fear about health-related scenarios throughout my life.

I think that a lot of this stems from having an orthodontist in middle school who made many mistakes in my dental care that led to a lot of consequences, surgeries, repair, etc.

At that young, impressionable age I first experienced that things can go wrong with our body and that the consequences are often uncomfortable and upsetting and out of our control.

So I have attempted to control things related to health many times in life. In my own life and also the lives of my husband and kids in particular.

It is right and good to steward our health as a gift but it is a never-ending, exhausting, sin-producing pattern when we try to control something that we actually cannot.

That gross bat was the ultimate proof to me that I am not in control of our health.

1 percent of bats have rabies and that bat, of all the bats, had to pick our house to squeeze it's way into and proceed to fly right at me in it's chaotic state.

There was nothing I could do to prevent this secnario.

I had no idea to make sure the doctor at the ER gave me the right shot that following day.

There was nothing I could do to prevent this scenario.

The cost of vaccination in time, money and side effects is bigger than I wish it was.

There was nothing I could do to prevent this scenario.

But I do have personal access to the sovereign God who is over every one of these details and could have absolutely prevented this scenario.

But He didn't.

Because He is after setting my heart free from the trap of control more than He is after my temporary comfort. It's better for me (and the people in my life too) . And a good Father will always choose the better thing for their kid.

Do you know what this freed me to do in this scenario?

3 things immediately come to mind.

I was able to rest in His care, reflect with gratitude and respond differently to future challenges.

First, I am still benefitting from facing firsthand that it's His job to care for me and my job to cast my cares on Him. I have less fear about illness than ever before becuase IT'S not ON ME to protect myself and my family. It's on Him. How freeing.

Second, I see that day differently than I did at first. Now I see how people were in place to help us. Now I see that we could have woken up to that bat biting one of our kids but we didn't. We spotted it in daylight hours and could capture it for testing. Now I see that Beck being loopy from hospital drugs made him forget the experience. Now I see that we didn't develop rabies and were protected from harm. Now I see that God was protecting us and meeting us in this experience.

Third, there have been more disappointing, sad and scary scenarios since then. Big surprise...life is full of light and shadows. But we are always making connections in the present and interpreting current time through the lens of our experiences. While I still have real emotions about the hard things of life, I can recall the past faithfulness of God and say, "He will be faithful again. He won't waste pain. He sees the whole picture. It passed through His hand before it got to me. He's a good dad. And on and on."

So yes, death came near in the form of a deadly disease that could have been transmitted to us. And a killing of the belief that I can keep harm from our family also happened that day.

And that killing has made me stronger.

Has this happened for you in some way in your life? I'd love to hear about it.

More stories to come...

In this with you,

Lauren