what I learned from sitting at the hospital all day

My heart is heavy tonight. This morning we received the call from Teresa Weinberg that Grant went into cardiac arrest and was on the way to the hospital. We spent the whole day with the Weinbergs at the hospital, waiting to what the Lord would do with him. I encourage you to go to the blog that they started to document the goodness of the Lord throughout this journey. Chuck tells more details about how it all happened and gives all the credit to where credit is due. Oh how we are praying for you, Weinbergs! May God do what seems best to Him!

It was truly incredible to see the church body show up and rally around our friends. Close to a hundred people visited the hospital and stayed for a while throughout the day. It was so cool to see the body of Christ come together to support those who are suffering. Although some of the people came just because they heard someone was in need, I realized that about 99% of the people there were there because the Weinberg family had ministered to them in some way. These people had felt the love of Christ from the Weinbergs and showing up today was in a way saying, “Thank you for touching my life. I count you as my beloved friends and you are in our prayers.” The relationship with each person is a little different, but the common element is a unified love for Jesus Christ. The body looks out for each other and the parts of the body all point to and look to the Head - and that’s what happened today.

It is fairly common to think about the brevity of life when someone you love is in the balance between life and death. I thought of it in terms of the passage that I have been studying lately, Hebrews 12:1-2. We are all running a race, but some of us have long races to run and others of us have shorter ones. The thing is that we have no clue how long ours will be. I could be running my final strides right now or I could be still at the beginning. But the point is that because we don’t know where in the race we are at, we must endeavor to run faithfully during every stage. Every day is just one more stride in which we look fixedly on Christ, cast off our sin, and hold steadfastly to the truth. Too much is at stake for us to fail to do this at any point in our race, any day of our life. And although this can seem overwhelming at times, we just have to take each day at a time and ask, “Am I running faithfully today? Am I looking to Jesus today?”

I am also reminded that events like this - events that stop the normal flow of life - are opportunities to cultivate humility. In our pride, we think that we deserve another day, or that pain or death is unfair, or that these kind of things shouldn’t happen. But in reality, we deserve hell and we are not in control of one molecule of matter or one second of time - our sovereign God has all in the palm of his hand. And that is the best place for us all to be because He loves us infinitely and only does what is best for us, even if that “best” doesn’t make sense to us.

How Good is God?: The Weinberg’s blog

Check it out. You’ll be glad you did.