In April I went into the hospital and stayed there a week. Subsequently, I have gone back numerous times. In fact, I have spent more time in the hospital this year than all the rest of my life combined. My lungs were filling with clots and I could barely breath. By the time I got admitted, my blood-oxygen level was below 90%. While I was there, doctors found a tumor in my wife’s right lung. In June, she had it removed and on the day of surgery the doctors found a new growth on her left lung. The one was removed on a Tuesday and the other that Friday. My wife, it turns out, has a very uncommon form of lung cancer that only affects non-smoking women.
This has been a year. It started with angry Trump supporters showing up at our home and at my office. It continued with angry people harassing my advertisers and station. And while the professional toll has been something to behold, it is nothing compared to the personal struggles my wife and I have had to deal with this year and will now continue to deal with.
For the first time we have had to actually dwell on the possibility that we could leave our children in the world without us long before any parent should have to depart. Between the weight of this political season and the struggles of health, I have spent a lot of time thinking. If my wife and I were to die, what would we want our children to know. What would we leave them with? And honestly, it is hard to separate the struggles of this year from each other. It envelops my thinking.
First, of course, I hope my children know I love them and want to keep them safe. More than once in the past few months my seven year old has asked why people hate us and hate me. The conversations at school turn to what parents talk about and I know I am not popular with more than one parent at my kids’ school. The other night, after the fall out from the latest Trump scandal, he came downstairs in the middle of the night worried that the Trump supporters were going to come back. He and his sister have already been yelled at in the store for my opposition to Trump.
I want them to know how much their mother and I love them. I want them to know that we stand in their room, in the shadows at night, just to watch them sleep. We steal glances and store them in the battle against time and age. We remember those things they will never have memory of about their lives.
Second, I want my children to know that God is real and should something happen to their mother and me that they should not blame him. We are not allowed reprieve from this world. I don’t have an answer for why God created the world as he did. If he knew everything, why did he let the devil enter the world? Why did he put Adam and Eve in the Garden with that tree when they could not eat it? I don’t have the answer, but then if I did have the answer to everything in faith, I know it would be a shallow faith and probably one I would have created. No person would create a faith with so many unknowns. But what I do know is that there must be some special role for us in the universe of eternity for God to go through this much trouble. And I also know that in creating this system he knew that the second person in the trinity would have to die on a cross.
So while I do not have all the answers and sometimes it is overwhelming and sometimes we want to blame God, Jesus has been there all along. God created a system in which…
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A good article. I hope he and his wife live to see their children into adulthood, but we are not promised these things.
Prayers up for the Erickson family.
Pray for righteousness to be restored and for the peace of Jerusalem
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