Boy Named Silas: All At Once

    Someone trying really hard to be profound once said, "Good things take time, but great things
happen all at once." It's probably from some chick flick I've since forgotten. In my experience, good things take time. Great things take even longer.

     It would require a whole book (which I would love to write one day) to narrate how Phillip and I met, fell in love, and wound up sharing our lives together. The falling in love part didn't take all that long (just ask my college roommate), but getting to the whole sharing our lives thing certainly did.

     Starting our family didn't happen "all at once," either, since we experienced two miscarriages before our first son was born.

     Looking back on Silas' birth history, I might rewrite the above quote altogether. Does this resonate with anybody? "Good things take time, but horrible things happen in an instant." All it took was a few short minutes in the delivery room for our lives to be thrown into complete chaos, a kind of chaos it took years to recover from.

     But know what? We have recovered. This morning we took Silas to the dietician, and she decided to wean him off his formula. Silas hasn't used his feeding tube in five months, but he still gets about half of his calories from drinking thickened pediatric formula.

     Until today, that is.

     That appointment might be one of those moments I look back on in ten years as a major turning point in our family history. No one who's been following Silas' story would deny that our report from the dietician qualifies as a monumental achievement. Basically, aside from needing his drinks thickened, Silas has just graduated to become a "normal" eater.

     On one hand, it just took a thirty-minute doctor visit to get to this point. On the other hand, it took five long years and eleven arduous months.

     Great things are happening in our family. But they didn't happen overnight. They started happening the day Silas was born. They continued on as God spared our child from a premature death and sustained him through countless bouts of pneumonia and lung illness. Silas' road to oral eating took the cooperative effort of half a dozen skilled therapists, the input of several involved specialists, and the prayers of thousands of believers who loved our son and cared for our family enough to intercede on is behalf.

     Great things have happened since the moment Silas was born, but today we get to more deeply experience that awesome work God promised. He's the one who started the miraculous healing in Silas, and he's the one who has carried it on to completion.

    And now, amidst my rejoicing, I can almost sense the smile of the Almighty as he whispers to my spirit, "Just wait and see what I'm about to do next."

We'll be seeing a lot more of this after today