Little Oak Tree

The little girl in this story turned 21 this year. I celebrate with gratitude the physical and spiritual vitality God has given her.

A nasty virus made a tag-team run through our family. As soon as one child began to recover, another would look at me with glassy eyes and say, “I feel hot.” Even both of us parents succumbed.

I was recovering when 5-year-old Dara began her bout. Because she was one of the last to get it, I was exhausted but not particularly worried. She should recover in a few days just like everyone else.

True to pattern, she spiked a hefty fever and spent the next couple nights in my room. My kids always felt comforted sleeping near me when they were sick. I worried less and slept more if I could reach the impromptu bed on the floor to check a forehead or answer my name.

Neither Dara nor I were sleeping much this night. I had had enough coaching from an early pediatrician and my own experience in the trenches not to freak out over every fever. But I was ready for this one to come down. Fever meds weren’t doing much, even though I was dosing on the clock. I fanned and sponged in the meantime.

About 3:30am, we sat on the edge of the bathtub with cool water splashing on our feet. We laughed there together in the middle of the night, while Dara chattered nonstop.

When I settled her back on her makeshift pallet of comforters and blankets, Dara said, “I just saw a picture.”

That was not a familiar phrase in our house, but something in me snapped to attention as I asked what she meant.

“When I closed my eyes just now, I saw a great big hand. And the hand was holding a little oak tree that had sprouted. And there was a little cloud.”

She moved on to rambling about other things and eventually went to sleep.

I didn’t.

For the rest of the night I lay conscious of something I had been longing for. I had bumped into the presence of God. He didn’t seem quite so far away right now. It was the same sensation as the cool water had been to my feet in the tub. Relief. Comfort. Togetherness. Laughter.

It felt like it had been a long time since my spirit had laughed. Or felt much of anything. I didn’t know what Dara’s picture meant, but somehow God had showed up when she described it.

I drifted off to sleep.

The fever broke the next day. Dara rebounded as quickly as her sisters.

After two more days, Ross left town for an overnight church leadership retreat. Dara spent the better part of that afternoon with one roller skate and one bare foot, “teaching” herself to skate inside and making our laminate floors look more like slippery ice.

After I fed them supper, four little girls sprawled like tired puppies on the floor in front of the TV to watch “Cinderella.”

When the movie was over, I turned on the lights and announced bedtime.

Hope said, “Dara, what are all those bruises?”

The child looked like someone had beat her to a pulp. Huge swatches of purple everywhere. And not just on knees or hips where the monopod skater would have landed.

A Google search of symptoms. A call to the pediatrician. A conversation with Ross to start for home. My mom would come stay with the other three. My dad drove us to the ER.

We sat for hours. They sent us to a pediatric after-hours. We sat more. I tried to interpret the nurses’ sideways glances. I overheard the word leukemia. We sat.

Dara needed to sleep. If they couldn’t do anything for us, I might as well take her home to bed and come back in the morning. Which we did.

Ross made his way back to town in the middle of the night. And the next morning he took Dara to the pediatrician’s office.

They ruled out leukemia based on her blood work.

But she was bleeding spontaneously, internally. We needed to go to the children’s hospital in a larger city.

The hospital also confirmed we were not dealing with leukemia. She had a different type of blood disorder in which, for some unknown reason, the body destroys all its platelets. Once it starts bleeding, it can’t stop. And often it starts bleeding unprovoked.

No known cause. No sure treatment, though they’d try a couple things over the next few days. And no long-term concern, probably. Most children recover on their own.

The only problem, they added, is the risk of brain hemorrhage. “If her body’s next spontaneous bleed is in the brain, there won’t be anything we can do to stop it. She could die from that.”

A team of nurses came in to insert an IV. Ross and I sat over at the edge of the room in that weird place where shock and processing and peace and concern all run together.

The nurses were talking to each other.

“Did you all know,” one said to the other two, “that in Old Irish, the name Dara means oak tree?”

“How do you even know that?” another responded, laughing.

“I remember reading it in a baby book when we were choosing names. Of course, we had a boy…”

Their conversation faded in the background as I made eye contact with Ross. I opened my hand and pointed to my palm. “Dara’s picture,” I reminded him with misty eyes.

On a day when I drove to Ocala to check on the rest of the family, I had the conversation with God that I had been dreading. What if the picture meant that He was planning to scoop up this little oak tree and take her to heaven now?

Well, what if it did?

I remembered one of the questions a pastor asked every parent at child dedications: Do you acknowledge that this child is the Lord’s, that you are only a steward of her life? And are you willing to let go of her life at any point He deems best?

I could answer that rationally. I had agreed with it as an act of my will. But here we were face to face with the possibility. And during a season when God did not feel particularly close to me.

Feelings don’t change truth. God was still Himself even if He was maintaining radio silence. And even if all this was really happening.

And there wasn’t really any other choice. Any control I ever thought I had was an illusion anyway. I said out loud, behind the wheel, at my lowest parent point, “She is Yours, not mine.”

There was a release in that surrender. Circumstances hadn’t changed, but there was a peace and freedom in agreeing with reality—Dara’s life was in God’s hands.

That had always been true. I was just agreeing with it on a new level.

Dara was brave with all the needles and exams and viewed her hospital stay as a very positive time. She enjoyed my undivided attention, lots of food she liked, and visits and gifts from friends. I was amazed and grateful at how non-traumatic the experience proved to be for her.

She and I played a lot together. We had some sweet times praying together and singing before bed. And whenever I would ask her “Where does God have you?” she would open her hand and point to her palm.

There was a verse I kept returning to in Psalm 37:19. “In the days of famine, they will have an abundance.”

I can’t imagine more abundance than we experienced from our family, friends, and church. It felt so extravagant that it was almost embarrassing. So much more than we needed.

My friend took Anna to theater practice every day. My sister-in-law got Hope to swim lessons. My mom fed and played and babysat endlessly. Someone arranged for some playdates and picked up my Sunday School responsibilities. A family from church took over feeding the cat we were looking after while someone was on vacation. Men came over to mow the grass. My neighbor sneaked in the house to do our laundry and straighten the mess I had left behind. Others visited us in the hospital with coloring books and markers and movies—and cups of coffee for me.

I may have been in a rough place spiritually—a famine, if you will—unable to see, hear, or feel God. But He was abundantly expressing love through His Body to us. I couldn’t deny that.

Dara treated herself like a delicate teacup that couldn’t be bruised and recuperated at home for the rest of the summer. She experienced no more difficulties and a steady return to normal blood levels over time.

Like I said, it was overwhelmingly non-traumatic for her. The character in the story who needed to undergo change, apparently, was the mother.

Our pediatrician articulated it best. Her message wasn’t something I could fully receive at the time. I just went home and wrote it in my journal for later.

We had come to her office for our first follow-up visit after the hospital. She said, “I was running the track at 4:30 this morning. While I was listening to a worship song about God being on the throne, I stopped. And prayed for you. I prayed for Dara, too, but I know she’s going to be ok. I mostly prayed for you. That you will get from this experience whatever it is God is wanting to do.”

Sometimes we know we’re hurting, but we just keep going without knowing how to fix it. Sometimes we can’t see how bad off we were until we look back years later.

In my spiritual journey I had left the green pastures and still waters for a long season in the valley of the shadow. I wasn’t being rebellious; I was just in a dry place emotionally and spiritually. I wouldn’t be at the other end of that valley for a long time. And in that valley, I was having a hard time hearing my Shepherd.

He and I both knew He hadn’t left.

And here in this long, confusing space He still had ways of communicating with me when He needed to get through.

He would speak through a nurse who memorized baby name books. Through a community who met needs. Through a praying pediatrician. And He was willing to let those messages sit for years, if necessary, until I could receive them.

He would accept the simple surrender of a control I never really possessed and trade it for some peace.

He would not only heal my daughter’s body but cause her spirit to sail through the process.

And He would begin something else monumental: freeing me from the grip of fear.

Fear is like a monster in the closet. It disappears when we turn on the light. The light, for me, came in facing one of the worst what-if scenarios I could imagine and bumping into His presence. Living through the uncertainty while He moved in abundance around me just wasn’t as bad as I imagined it would be.

There would be harder trials elsewhere. There would be chapters without a nice ending. But they wouldn’t have the same flavor of fear again.

“Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I fear no evil, for You are with me…” Psalm 23:4

I saw it for myself when I was powerless to control an outcome. Maybe that’s the purpose of the valley walks. Somehow He breaks fear in the valley. Of all places. What a Hero He is to use the fearful place to break fear. To turn it on its head and bring us out the other side not just alive but better off for the journey.

He is with us even in the radio silence. His care is extravagant and abundant, for us and our children, and He will express it through any channel He chooses. He has us in the palm of His hand.

Not only my children, but I myself am held there, just like that little oak tree.