This is a quick, broken-arm update.

Today’s x-rays showed that my daughter’s bones are not growing straight.  Apparently, the bones shifted when her swelling went down.  Now new bone is growing in such a way that her arm bone is “bowing.”  Her bone sits at a 10 degree angle, whereas “normal” ones sit nearly straight on the vertical with perhaps a 1 degree tilt.

The good news is that the doctors *think* that as she grows, the bone will naturally straighten itself out.

The bad news is that there is a chance the bone won’t, and she could end up with a permanent “bowed” appearance in her lower arm.

I saw the arm without the cast today.  The bowed-ness is visible.

The alternative is invasive surgery where the doctor re-breaks the bones and then inserts rods and pins to hold them in place.  This procedure would leave two scars, one on top and the other on the bottom.

I have to say I don’t like either of those choices.

I don’t want my little girl to have any defect in any way!  Is that shameful of me to feel that way?  My head knows that these bodies are just temporary carriers until we get to heaven.  But my fleshly  heart is weeping.  I know it’s silly.  It’s just ten little degrees.  Ten little degrees that show up as an obvious slant.

Today I can’t see the forest.  I can’t see God’s plan for my little girl in all of this.  I just wish it had never happened.  I wish she had never fallen off the balance beam. I wish that God had answered my prayers in the affirmative when I asked Him to send his healing down to her.

Instead, He said He would heal those bones…but not in the way that they were before she broke them.

What’s up with that?

I am squirming in this chair as I write these words because I know what God’s answer is to my questions.  He would likely answer my questions just as he answered Job’s in chapter 38:

Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation?
Tell me, if you understand.

Who marked off its dimensions? Surely you know!
Who stretched a measuring line across it?

On what were its footings set,
or who laid its cornerstone-

while the morning stars sang together
and all the angels shouted for joy?

“Who shut up the sea behind doors
when it burst forth from the womb,

when I made the clouds its garment
and wrapped it in thick darkness,

when I fixed limits for it
and set its doors and bars in place,

when I said, ‘This far you may come and no farther;
here is where your proud waves halt’?

I’m just a hunk of clay that gave birth to another hunk of clay.  The Lord is the one who knit her in my womb.  He put all her pieces together.  If He wants her arm to be different, who am I to question him? I am her mother.  Like a she-bear protecting her cubs from danger, I have an instinctive impulse to lash out when she is in danger.  But to whom do I lash out?  There is nothing in my power that will make things right in her arm.  Only in the LORD’s power, through Christ, can her arm be made whole again in the way it was before it was broken.

I must trust today that God sees the forest.  He is drawing out her life and has a plan.  Maybe this experience will guide her toward a medical profession.  Or maybe this is a test for me to prove that I really can let go and let God.  Because all I can see today is a section of the forest choked with weeds and dirt and nasty things that scurry on the ground, I have to trust that the Lord guides my feet and her feet — and her arm bones.

We’ve decided not to do surgery — the doctor recommended that we take the “wait and see” approach.  Is this the right trail through the forest?

Many are the plans in a man’s heart, but it is the LORD’s purpose that prevails.  Proverbs 19:21