Two weeks ago, I spent a few days in a Pediatric ICU while my daughter struggled to breathe.
The whole incident started when her mother and I picked her up from Daycare. She'd just gotten up from a nap and her breathing was visibly labored. She'd had a cold for a while but we'd never worried about it... her doctor had listened to her lungs and said that everything was fine. Suddenly, it wasn't.
This led to a cascade of events that had me holding her in an emergency room so that the doctors could snake a tube down her nose to suction mucous out of her lungs, an action that visibly hurt and panicked her as she coughed and choked. Then the Doctor came in and said she would need to be transferred to a children's facility, and not the one nearby, because she need an ICU unit.
My world stopped. Suddenly we'd gone from a scary breathing situation to an intensive care situation while my little girl cried and clawed at me to help her and... I just couldn't.
I said a prayer, in that moment, that I have revisited with the Lord several times since, the type of prayer I have never prayed before. It went on for awhile, but the basic thrust of it went as follows:
"Lord, this one isn't negotiable. If you make me watch my daughter die gasping, you and I are done."
I learned, later, that Katrina was never really in that much danger. Her O2 levels never fell dangerously, and the ICU was needed more for its monitoring capabilities in case things got to that point. Regular breathing treatments (fought by her every step of the way) and a high powered oxygen flow saw to it that she was safe until the asthmatic reaction her body had to whatever virus she carried had relaxed and she was able to comfortably breathe on her own. She had an amazing team of child care specialists watching over, including doctors, nurses, Respiratory technicians, even child life specialists who helped make her feel at home in the strange environs of the PICU.
But you could have fooled me at the time. Her whole tiny body seemed to clench to get breaths in, and I guess all I really heard from the Doctor was "ICU." The people taking care of her seemed to be torturing her. When they came to load her up for the trip, her mother and I worried she wouldn't make it. I was terrified that I was saying goodbye.
Now, I want to be clear that I do not attribute her survival or even her recovery to my prayer. I don't think that she was divinely scheduled to die and then I prayed in anger and God was all; "Oooh, wait, Dan seems serious, we'd better rethink this plan..." I don't think the world works that way, and I certainly don't think that the parents whose children DID lose their lives around the world that day experienced that heartbreaking loss because they failed to threaten God appropriately, whatever that would mean.
I am talking to you about this because people have regularly asked me to talk about a time when my faith failed, and two weeks ago, it did. I was scared, I was angry, and so I looked at a being I believe to be all knowing and all powerful and then THREATENED that being. I made an ultimatum, I put my God to the test. You're not supposed to do that, and I did.
That prayer did have it's upsides, of course. Normally when I get that angry or scared my strategy is to leave the situation until I calm down, and while I did go into the hallways when I felt I was on the verge of irrational action, channeling all that anger at God when I did kept it from going at, say, my wife, or the nurses, or even poor Katrina. But in the time since that prayer I have found my relationship with God to be a bit more awkward, like after a huge fight with a friend or loved one when things seem to be normal again but what was said in anger seems to hang hovering over everything else.
I know that God loves and forgives me, just as I know that God loves and watches over my daughter. We'll be fine, and maybe when I've had time to really process everything that happened and was said, I will find my strength to be stronger for it.
But for those who want to know if my faith ever falters; yes. Sometimes it does.
