Someone once asked me to recall a time that I knew with surety that God was real and present. It was a part of a weekend retreat with a group of other young people, and we all took turns answering. I remember trying to think of something convincing, or something extra “spiritual,” or maybe something that would amount to a sign or wonder. Something indisputably awesome. Those were the sorts of things I was obsessed with at the time. Eventually my turn was coming around and I gave up trying to impress (a rare feat of maturity for 17-year-old me) and I decided to say something true, something that was burned into my memory in a way that couldn’t be revoked.
I was eight years old; it was a blizzarding January day, and my sister had just died the day before. No one in my family could think. Our whole minds and hearts were consumed with the fact that the world itself had been torn in two, and where life once stood there was only a gaping tomb. My father, my mother and I sat in the living room watching the snow fall. My dad said something to the effect of, “I guess I need to shovel the driveway. People will be coming.” And no sooner had he said it than we heard the shunk of a snow shovel hitting the driveway and whoosh of its load being tossed into the yard. Shunk, whoosh, shunk, whoosh. Our neighbor had our driveway cleared in no time. My mom said, “We should think about breakfast,” and the doorbell rang. A friend of hers was there with trays of food for us. As we ate it dawned on my parents how many people were coming to town for the funeral, some of them coming to stay with us. Everything needed to be cleaned. The phone rang, and on the other end were more and more people offering to clean our home, do our laundry, pick people up from the airport. In retrospect, this was probably spread out over the course of days or weeks, but in my eight year old memory, it was a tragic, haunted, frozen yet miraculous, overwhelming, love soaked January morning in which I knew with surety that God was real and present.
Since then there have been very few times that I had such great need to know with surety that God was real and present, that he was actively caring for me and my family. I’ve lived an enormously privileged life. It’s not as if nothing has ever happened to me, but most of my trials are ones I’ve been lucky to have, and most of my tight situations were one that I had an emergency exit for. Much like when doctors and nurses rush out of your hospital room to take care of an “actual emergency” somewhere else, it’s actually kind of reassuring not to need intensive care all that often.
Then at 1:00 am on June 3rd, I woke up in a pool of my pregnant wife’s blood. I can be prone to exaggeration at times, but this is not one of them. We both woke up because we were soaking wet. In that moment an entire season of trauma, met in full by the caring and present love of God, began.
Let me just give you the highlight reel.
When Brooke started bleeding, we had a friend visiting us in Creede. He is a nurse who also has a nice car and great skill driving at…unsafe velocities. Because of him we were able to remain calm and get to the hospital faster than an ambulance could take us.
At Alamosa hospital they determined Brooke was stable, but needed to be flown to a hospital with a level four NICU and a blood bank. The hospital staff was able to assemble a NICU trained helicopter crew that took her safely to Denver.
Our friend drove me back to Creede, where two sets of loving grandparents agreed to watch Elsie while I sped to Denver to meet Brooke.
By the time I made it to Denver and had seen Brooke, it was 10:00 pm and I had only slept maybe two hours the night before. There was a bed ready for me at the Downing House, provided by longtime friends. My wife and unborn child were safe, and I was able to sleep in a real bed.
Over the next week Brooke received the very best medical care. Her condition was diagnosed. We decided we had to stay in Denver until the birth. One set of friends came and told us to stay in their home for two weeks after Brooke was released. They were gone for ten days on a trip anyway and were happy to help. Another set of friends came and told us that they were leaving for a five-week trip right after that time and needed house sitters. Our lodging in Denver was taken care of.
We cancelled one flight after another. Our flights back to Oslo. My flights to Rome. And much to our surprise, our Norwegian credit card came with travel insurance automatically. Everything we cancelled was covered.
We were unsure of our health coverage. Norwegian healthcare applies to us in some ways when we’re abroad but not in others. We technically still had Colorado’s health coverage, but it was up for reassessment and we weren’t really residents here anymore. We had travel insurance, but our case was complicated, and it was hard to tell what they would cover. We had no idea how these things would piece together to cover hundreds of thousands of dollars of medical costs. We were weighing the pros and cons of declaring bankruptcy. Thanks to the hard work of one social worker, our whole family’s health coverage in Colorado was renewed, and everything has amounted to maybe fifty dollars.
We had to move this summer in Norway. We’d signed the lease termination papers only days before this happened. Our friends in Oslo have worked together to move us out into a storage unit.
It’s almost impossible to find housing in Oslo without going in person to a viewing. Even then it’s pretty cutthroat. But just last week we signed a lease with someone we met through a church housing board who decided to trust us, and even delay the lease start date until we’re able to move in. Another friend went to see the apartment for us before we signed on.
When Brooke bled for the third time and we knew she would be in the hospital for the rest of the pregnancy, she was already hanging out with two friends who adored Elsie, and the feeling was mutual. I was able to drive Brooke straight to the hospital and leave her with them. They helped again the next day when we discovered that Brooke was going to have a C-section that day, and our parents couldn’t arrive for another six hours. While Brooke was going into surgery, they were playing with her and loving her.
We have had so many small needs. We weren’t planning on having this baby in this country, or this early. Basinets, carriers, clothes, car seats, gift cards, checks, and all manner of other things have just shown up at our door. Every few days there is love in an envelope or box. The list of thank-you notes we need to write is longer than I want to think about.
Honestly, I could go on for as long as you like, but that’s 686 words abridging the short version. Not one need of ours has been left unmet. Not one detail unseen. It wasn’t all in one morning. It’s been three months of compounding moments of miraculous love.
And yet there’s part of me that is skeptical enough to challenge even these three months. My faith has taken quite a few turns and hit all variety of phases and patches since I was eight. Because of the life I’ve led, I have all of the intellectual skills needed to surgically disassemble these examples, these gifts, from moments of divine presence into ordinary but fortuitous happenings. Bureaucrats doing their jobs and friends booking vacations. At philosophical, theological, practical and emotional levels I am as well equipped as anyone to wrench the divine from these material things and toss all meaning they might have contained into the void. Nothing is undeniable, everything can be made subject to scrutiny, and the tools of critical deconstruction are cheap on the open market.
But somehow I know that to take these tools of mind and use them to divorce active divine love and presence from these acts of kindness and care on the part of my friends, family, and even complete strangers, would be to commit sacrilege. It would be to desecrate something holy.
I was trying to explain this feeling to myself, this feeling of my knife wielding hand being held back from sacrificing even just one moment of good fortune on the altar of Superior Understanding, when I began to think about the Eucharist, or Holy Communion. I grew up in a brand of Christianity that treated the elements of the bread and wine (but grape juice, because we’re not heathens) as pure symbol. They represent Jesus’ body and blood, but they’re just ordinary themselves. The elements are only material, and anything spiritual is just taking place in the mind and heart of the believer. As I grew older and began to study Christianity in its multiplicity of forms, and in its longstanding heritage, I found that believing that way put me in a tiny minority.
In fact, basically all Christians believe that the elements, the bread and wine, actually become something more in some way. They are still bread and wine, but they are also Jesus himself, they are God showing up in a material way, they are the divine made real and present to us. It’s not an intellectual decision to treat them as divine, they are so in fact. You could never prove it under a microscope. If you want to deconstruct it all, you can. (Much like the body of Jesus himself, the elements do not resist your mistreatment.) But to do so would be to violate something holy. They are this way, and if by faith you know it, then your hand is stayed from surgically piecing them apart to prove your own intellectual might or avail your own critical heart.
You learn to simply receive it by faith and with thanksgiving.
So here I am, three months into an ongoing season of trauma, stress and fear. Hospital beds, a toddler who is tired of being hauled around, and now some brutal late-night feedings. We are still in America, waiting for Everett’s passport. I am still exhausted. My beard is a bit whiter than it was three months ago. Every day takes every ounce from both of us. And yet, this season has been laced, soaked, propelled and underpinned by the real and present love of God in the works of others on our behalf. Every day I see a new way in which God himself has shown up in our lives to carry us through something that was beyond us. Like the lilies of the field that do not labor or spin and yet are clothed, or the sparrows with no crops or barns who are fed, God has been hard at work arranging for our every need.
To all of you who have been the body and blood of Jesus to us, thank you. And thanks be to God, who has made himself known and present to us through the love of our neighbors.
The Adventures of Brooke and Jesse 
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