Moments before the maelstrom broke

Nathanael’s left hand.

That Tuesday 1st morning in cold July, as we set off to have pictures taken of our baby, we thought little of it to be frank. Sure, we’d have some information for how baby was tracking, but I honestly cannot recall us talking about the significance of the moment coming at us from the horizon.

At about late morning, when I was waved into the sonographer’s room, I still had no idea. A second scan was conducted, in silence, the doctor attending with the sonographer — who I thought had lacked competence, because she had asked us to come back again later for another scan because she couldn’t see certain organs well enough. It was a story to get us out of there in order that she could brief the doctor.

Something was horribly wrong.
We were none the wiser as we sipped
on coffee and hot chocolate in the café.

Even the moment when we were ushered into the doctor’s office I still didn’t get it. I just wasn’t thinking. Something was going on, but I had no idea what we were about to experience in those fleeting minutes.

Those moments I wrote about, but I never wrote about the moment beforehand.

The moments before brokenness are moments of naivety. We never imagine what is about to take place; how our whole life as it is, or was, is about to change — unequivocally, irrevocably, undeniably, uncontrollably.

The moments before the maelstrom breaks out are those instants in time where the angels prepare for war. For a war like no other, God prepares them.

Within the divine and eternal realms there is unabashed solemnity. Within the dark realms, parties of derision, divisions of calamity, emerge then rage. And we’re all oblivious, apart from the fact we can tell life was never meant to be this way, not in the original blueprint.

Before the maelstrom arrives, we have no frame of reference for where on earth or all eternity we are. There is no clue for what is about to rain over us. So, when all hell breaks loose in the saying of a few words that take a second or two to say, or in the tears within a doctor’s eyes, his chin aquiver, there can only be disbelief; there can only be a hangover of conscious awareness, the mind lagging and hanging onto what it previously knew. Even as the minutes are replaced by hours, understanding is still out-of-range.

There is a place in time where loss bewilders us.

Those moments of shock are what we view as normal as we look back. We always imagined such moments were possible, we just never thought we would quite have to experience them. But we do. They come to us all at some point or other.

July First is as an important day for us as any. It was the day our dreams began to die. It was the day time stood still. It was also the day when a weird sort of season of life began; a season that had no discernible or clear ending, but just ebbed away silently in the cool dark of night — it was an ambiguous grief that left us amazed at the depths and possibilities of life, the magnitude of death and existence, the hope of eternity beyond all sorrow.

All this out of a moment of complete devastation.

Four years on life is different in so many ways. God has changed much of the circumstances and living environment we enjoyed back then. In so many ways these changes have occurred twice over.

Even on the day the maelstrom broke we had such an awareness of God’s abiding in the shock of it all. We can say, as we look back, we’ve never doubted the goodness of God.