The memory is burned bright in my mind. The sun is shining outside. My baby sister is getting bathed in the kitchen sink. She is smiling as warm water streams down her head soaking her hair. I decide to go see what my dad is doing in the garage. I don’t even get to the garage when suddenly my mom calls out frantically for my dad. My dad runs in past me. He looks over my sister and immediately begins performing CPR on her.
My dad is puffing small breaths into my 1 yr old sister and making compressions on her chest. As my sister lays there, limp, blood is dripping out of her mouth and running down her cheek. I am six years old as I look on in horror. The paramedics come. My parents are trying to console each other and failing. I feel all alone. They take my sister away in an ambulance, but it is already too late. My sister’s heart has stopped. That Christmas day of 1972 is the last memory I have of my sister, Laura.
I am crying as I write this. Even today, I still can feel what that moment was like.
I suspect a lot of us have similarly painful experiences. Perhaps, you have spent way too many hours around IVs, hospital beds, and medical tests. Maybe you are way too familiar with chemotherapy. Or maybe your experience was more about abuse. Where you grew up, it wasn’t safe. Possibly, you had to raise yourself as your parents were absent (physically or otherwise). Maybe your spirit was ground to a pulp by harsh words that would never end.
Whatever it is for you, it’s easy to look at the experience as just this hot, smelly, turd in your life.
What do you do with an experience like this? That’s what I want to talk about today.
I believe there are two things we can do with an experience like this. And we must do these things in order. First we must wrestle. Then we can redeem.
Wrestle
We have a lot of different responses to these heart breaking experiences. Some of us try to pretend it wasn’t that bad. We think things like, “It was kind of bad, but other people have had it worse.” Some of us try to ignore the experience. We try hard not to think about it, hoping that over time, the experience will just fade from our memory.
Others of us respond in anger. We blame God. We lash out at others. And yet others of us will attempt to escape. We try to bury the experience in alcohol or drugs.
In the Bible there is a story of a man named Jacob. Jacob was a deceiver. He tricked people into giving him what he wanted. Jacob finally found himself backed into a corner and his deceptions would no longer work. Jacob was out of options and at the end of his rope. In this desperate moment, Genesis 32, describes Jacob wrestling with God all night – literally. Jacob grabbed a hold of God and didn’t let go. In verse 26 it says, “But Jacob said, ‘I will not let you go unless you bless me.'”
After this God renamed Jacob to Israel. “Israel” means, “he who wrestles with God.” God formed a whole nation after Jacob/Israel.
I think this is a model for us. When we are out of options, when the bottom has dropped out, and we are desperate for answers, we should grab a hold of God – and not let go. We should wrestle.
I think God is big enough and “man enough” to rise to our wrestling. If you want to have a “knock down, drag out” with God, go ahead. He already knows how you feel. I honestly think God would rather this than you pretending or running or hiding.
If you have a hot smelly turd of an experience in your life, wrestle with it, learn from it, and grow and mature from it. It won’t be easy, but it will be worth it.
Redeem
We think of these experiences as our hot smelly turds. So, we try to hide them out of embarrassment. We hope no one will notice them.
However, when spread around, a hot smelly turd can turn into some really good fertilizer to grow a garden. The honest truth is that people need us to share our turds. These experiences are a source of great strength and power in our life.
When we learn to tap into the power of our crappy experiences, we can use this power to transform others’ lives. We can share the deep wisdom we’ve unearthed through the wrestling we’ve done. Instead of saying, “I think …,” we can share, “I know …” More importantly, we can accept and support. We can empathize, and relate. And we can give hope by being on the other side of the experience.
When you use your horrific experiences and your struggles to transform other’s lives, you get to redeem the experience. You get to turn the experience completely around and make it mean something special and new. It is quite possible that the hot smelly turd you’ve been hiding from the world is dead center in the calling you are desperate to live.
What horrific experiences or struggles have you gone through? What are the ways can you think of to use these experiences to transform others’ lives?
