"Why Would God Let All This Happen to Me?!"

The answer may surprise you!

I'm coping! Kind of! Snuggling up in Dave's favorite hoodie helps.

Whew. Folks, it has been some week out here in my little corner of the desert.

Things have been so crazy that I have more than once felt - dare I say - deserted. (I would say “pardon the pun,” but the pun is the point.)

No, I certainly didn't feel deserted or left to flounder by our friends and family. Everyone has been so incredibly solicitous and supportive, and I'm truly grateful. But I did sort of wonder whether God went on vacation and left in charge a temp from some lesser universe, a world where Murphy's Law rules and chaos is the goal.

Why so melodramatic? Let's see. On Monday, I drove my partner, our Editor-in-Chief and publisher, David Swindle, over to Palm Springs, about an hour away, for his fourth ketamine infusion treatment. The infusions, meant to treat his PTSD, had been going well, but this time, several factors were different. At the end of the session, I learned that David was going to spend a few days in the hospital to address the concerns that had arisen.

I could review all the ups, downs, agony, and uncertainty that the hospital stay entailed, but honestly, I'm too exhausted. Suffice to say, Dave ended up staying a little longer than just the three days, and was moved to a hospital two hours away, where, contrary to what we were expecting, we've been unable to visit, due to COVID-19 procedures. As of this writing, we expect that he will be discharged early tomorrow afternoon, Pacific time.

But before I had any idea what to expect out of his hospital stay, here's what the rest of my week looked like:

• I've been coordinating with four different doctors and therapists, plus the ones at the hospital, trying to get everybody on the same page. One day, I got 27 phone calls - never mind the outgoing calls I made, and all the texts.

• I've been concerned about putting content here, and I haven't been very good about it.

• Dave's car broke down, and I had to have it towed home from Joshua Tree, with Jasmine, our dog, in the backseat, losing her mind.

• My car broke down, and there were three separate issues that needed to be resolved - by three separate mechanics.

• I scratched my cornea in the dumbest way possible: by accidentally driving into a zephyr with my driver's side window down. A zephyr is a tiny, RV-sized tornado that blows with incredible force, and it shot sand straight into my eye.

• The zephyr shot sand straight into my eye as I was leaving to bring David a bag full of his necessities. I am not great at highway driving, especially on interstates I'm unfamiliar with, or that are undergoing construction. I delivered to Dave a bag of his favorite books and PJ pants driving in a car with the check-engine light on, the driver side window stuck down, on an unfamiliar interstate with construction work, using one eye. And did I mention it's still 93° out here? Air conditioning is not much use in a car with the window stuck down.

• There's a kangaroo rat in the house, and I'm absolutely terrified of mice and rats. I am the household’s designated spider remover because I find them so much more appealing than rodents. Do you think having a dog ought to help? Well, Jasmine thinks we got her a pet. Jasmine is the pet. The pet doesn't get a pet!

Several other things went annoyingly or expensively wrong, but that's enough bullet points.

Friday was an especially nerve-wracking day. Again, I'm too beat to lay out all the reasons why, but the hospital took all day to decide whether to discharge Dave that day or to keep him for the weekend, and it was a tedious process - tedious and inscrutable. Finally, that evening, I left to go get some groceries, and I came back to find that Jasmine had consumed David's favorite yoga mat. I was gone for all of 50 minutes, and she'd been a little angel during the six hours I had spent driving to the hospital the day before.

As I stared dumbly at the hundreds of scraps of shredded foam, I found myself reaching automatically for my bottle of blood pressure meds. It occurred to me: I'm really, really, really, stressed out. “God,” I heard myself say, “some of this stuff has got to let up. Something's got to give.”

That was Friday. By today, Sunday, “stuff” has already started to let up. I knew it would. If there's anything like a motto that I live by, it's, “this, too, shall pass.”

Sure enough, my car window is repaired. My eye is doing better. I haven't seen the kangaroo rat today, and Jasmine's interior decorating preferences have been taken into consideration. Best of all, Dave has gotten the okay from his doctor to come home with me tomorrow! Of course, that one was the biggie. I'm incredibly relieved - though I'll really be able to exhale when I've hugged him and we're pulling out of the hospital parking lot together.

But all this did make me wonder, why all of this at once? Everyone has heard of Murphy's Law, and I bet we've all experienced a situation or two that seems to prove it. But why should that be? I mean, what are all those people talking about when they remind us that God never gives us more than we can handle? It sure seems like a living, loving God could prevent all of the things from crashing down on us at once. Why doesn't He pace things a little bit?

A couple of days past my stress-y, distress-y mini-meltdown, I have a hypothesis. I think it has to do with free will.

Too often, we treat prayer, and the idea that God is looking out for us, as something between a magic spell and an insurance policy. I bet a lot of us have prayed something like, “God, please don't let me have left the hair dryer on and burned the house down,” or “God, please make sure I get my fill-in-the-blank today!” Do we expect God to rewind time if we did, in fact, leave the hair dryer on and start a fire, physically transforming the smoking rubble of our houses back to intact brick or vinyl? Do we expect God to physically inhabit the mailman, or the pharmacist, or the coworker, and inspire them to suddenly prioritize our check, prescription, or report?

I'd venture that most of us don't. But somehow, that feels like a way to pray. It's also a way to acknowledge and express our nervousness about something, without having to talk to another human about our feelings - which some of us are loathe to do.

God gives us free will to make our own choices. Most of the time, that feels great. But we are also free to make choices that are irresponsible, self-sabotaging, or generally less than wise. And the thing is, everybody else has that freedom, too. So that means we're not just affected by our own choices. Other people's choices affect us, too, and too often, we feel that, when they affect us negatively, the universe is out to get us. Or, in my case, they cause us to feel that perhaps God has booked a week at his timeshare on Neptune and left the office in the hands of someone who barely got a GED.

But I realize, with the benefit of a little bit of perspective, that God has not, in fact, deserted me. Nor will He ever. The truth is, if I'm really honest about it, I could have reacted differently to my crazy week. I could have even prevented some of the things that happened! For instance, I could have had the window of my car fixed the very first time it started acting funny. And I could have gotten Jasmine a crate, so that she would be safe left at home for extended periods. I just … didn't. It's not exactly that I thought God would magically make sure nothing inconvenient ever happened to me! I know full well that inconvenient things do and can happen. But I chose not to plan for some of them. That is the result of the judgments I was free to make - not the result of a change to God's presence in my life.

And what about the biggie - the event that really sent me spiraling? Well, my partner had a medical emergency. This is because he has free will, too, and his body and mind do not operate according to what would be easiest for him - or for me, or for anyone else who interacts with him. He's only human, and so sometimes his body and mind operate in ways that are suboptimal - just like everybody's body and mind do. Including mine.

While I absolutely trust God to take care of me, of David, and of you, I needed a reminder to reframe my expectations of what that looks like. God taking care of us, His children, does not mean that no harm will ever come to us. Rather, it means that He will be there with us as we deal with the difficulties that are baked into a system wherein we operate with free will. And it has to be that way, because free will is crucial to developing and maintaining faith.

All that said, though, if anyone knows how to get rid of kangaroo rats, I'm all ears. Those suckers are definitely the work of some temp in God's office!

Be gentle with yourselves,

Sally Shideler

Managing Editor

Chief Editor-in-Chief Wrangler