Henrietta United Church of Christ

Rev. David Inglis and Karen Tambasco June 22, 2008

Genesis 7:11-24

“No Pain, No Gain”

As I read this story from Genesis, I think about the series of devastating natural disasters like the ones that have recently hit the Midwest, China, and Myanmar. How can a good God allow destruction, suffering, and overwhelming loss in this world? Are these things punishments from God, as a number of prominent religious leaders said Hurricane Katrina was, because of New Orleans’ reputed immorality? Were too many town farmers spending Saturday nights dancing at the grange hall and skipping church the next morning? I’m sure there are some preachers who are trying to make sense of such devastation in terms like that.

But if we step back and look at the world that we live our mortal lives in, we see that the whole physical universe is an ongoing dance between destruction and creation, life and death. The universe started out with a bang–a big one. But the chaotic debris formed into stars and galaxies. Dying stars exploded. But those huge forces of destruction forged the same atoms that make up planets, plants, and people–us. A meteor hit the earth 65 million years ago, and about half of all the species became extinct, including all the dinosaurs. Finally the puny little mammals could come out of their holes and get busy evolving into us. Forest fires clear the dead wood and old timber so new plants and trees can grow, fertilized by the ashes. It is precisely because everything is always changing, dying and making room for new life and room for improvements that we humans are here today. And now we are joining the ongoing process of creation by working to make the world better for our children, who will in turn do the same for their children. So those of us who recognize a Higher Power at work in this wondrous process we call Creation can see that change, destruction and death are a necessary part of a divine plan in which creation is continuously evolving into greater complexity, intricacy, beauty, and harmony.

Jesus said, “God makes his rain to fall on the just and the unjust.” Storms and disasters aren’t directed at people personally. But sometimes life’s storms, illnesses, losses, and tragedies do hit us very personally. Is there some spiritual purpose for our pain and suffering?

Karen Tambasco has offered to share her experience of a personal storm that she and her family went through. Her experience has a lot to teach us about why a loving God allows “bad” things to happen in our lives.

Karen:

When Paige was born, not many know this, but she was readmitted to the hospital the same night we had been released. She was born on a Monday and we were sent home on Wednesday. That day went well, until, 10:00 PM that evening. Paige began screaming and didn’t stop...all night she cried. She was three days old. “Doesn’t a newborn sleep all the time?” was all I could think. At 4:00 AM we were on the phone with the pediatrician. What’s funny about this is lots of people are up with their babies all night the first night home from the hospital. Paige would sleep if I was holding her, but as soon as I would lay her down she would cry...and not stop. For some reason I insisted on calling the pediatrician at 4:00 AM. Something wasn’t right, was all I knew. After a very long phone call they finally told us what I never expected to hear--bring her to the Emergency Room. So we went, at 5:00 AM, brand new parents, no sleep, to the E.R. Of course, she fell asleep on the ride to the hospital and by the time we got there we were feeling pretty silly. But we saw the doctors, and they examined her and decided to run some tests. At 8:00 AM they came in and told us they had found a mass in her stomach and they were admitting her to the hospital.

The world stopped for Rich and me at that point. They told us they didn’t think it was cancer. We spent all day Thursday and Friday in the hospital and they sent us home Friday night. They were keeping tabs on us and her and had decided to do ultra sounds on this mass once a week until they got some answers. The doctors told us that they had never seen a mass like this in a newborn and they were perplexed. They asked us for permission to survey the GI World Wide Web and ask what to do. They wanted to put pictures of Paige’s internal organs in medical books to teach about this unusual issue. Doctors from all over the world weighed in on how to proceed with Paige’s unexplained mass in her stomach. Strong Hospital finally concurred they needed to biopsy the mass to determine exactly what it was. So at the end of September off we went to figure out what this mass was. They took her from us, sedated her and off she went. It was horrible. I was sick. Less than 10 minutes later my pediatrician who had gone to the hospital on her day off to observe all of this came out and told me: The mass that had been there for three weeks was inexplicably gone. The doctors finally agreed she had finally passed the mass and that its makeup couldn’t be explained. They told me for lack of a better term they called it a lacto bezor–a calcification of lactose that can sometimes build up in the stomach, most generally associated with ingestion of high doses of lactose. Paige, being a newborn, hadn’t consumed that, so they were perplexed. They did agree that her crying the night they brought us into the ER was a cry of pain. I hadn’t been off my rocker when I told the nurse “she sounds like she is in pain”. They told me this mass, most likely being mobile within her stomach, had blocked the passage of food from the stomach to be digested and was building up fluids and gas and causing her discomfort.

Fast forward to 2001. January 2001 I was pregnant with Andrew and due in April. Paige, now 15 months old, seemed to have the eternal stomach bug. Her diapers were not normal. Paige had become a difficult child in the sense that she wouldn’t eat. She would fight Rich and me every time we told her it was time for dinner. She had realized that food made her hurt, but Rich and I hadn’t figured that out yet. She wouldn’t sleep through the night, and barely had the ambition to learn to walk. She was very clingy--she had really bad separation anxiety. All I could think about was how tired I was. Being pregnant with Andrew had sapped all of my energy. It was hard. It was really hard. From there you know the rest of the story. Four months later Paige was diagnosed with Celiac disease 2 weeks before Andrew as born.

I was beside myself. What do you feed a child that can have absolutely nothing in the cupboard? All my friends were having their toddlers eat Cheerios, animal crackers, teddy grahams, Gold Fish, fruit snacks… everything on the baby aisle was forbidden for her and there were no substitutes for those types of foods in 2001. There are now, there wasn’t then. To say I was a little hysterical would be fairly accurate. Rich and I argued more. He kept saying “thank you God for helping us to figure this out”, which only infuriated me more because he got to go to work and not worry about feeding her breakfast, snack, lunch, snack, dinner, snack. He knew I would take care of everything. I wasn’t so sure. I was stuck at home with a “sick” child and a newborn.

I was changing diapers, cooking, cleaning and trying to tell myself I had made the right decision to be a stay at home mom. So I kept going...and we struggled through; I learned, Paige adapted, and Andrew grew. Then to top it off 9/11 happened. I remember thinking “what kind of a world have I brought my children into?” Terrorists...illnesses...what have I done?

It was within the last few years, when life has become a little easier, that I’ve had a chance to reflect upon that time in my life. I’ve been able to put all the pieces of events together, to where the jigsaw puzzle of my life in 2001 actually makes more sense to me. In doing that, I have learned a lot about myself. I’ve learned a lot about what makes Rich and me tick. I’ve gained more perspective on my faith.

The difficult part of getting diagnosed with Celiac disease is getting a doctor to believe you need to be tested. It’s being taught that it’s a rare illness. The typical time frame to be diagnosed with Celiac disease in the U.S. is eleven years. When Paige was diagnosed at 19 months we were told she was starving to death, because her body could absorb no nutrition from the food she was able to eat. Could she have withstood eleven years of what she was going through? Because Paige had this other issue as a new born, when Paige was really ill my doctor never fought me on sending her to a specialist. The mass in her stomach was never really explained, so when the symptoms of Celiac disease were present, before we knew it was Celiac, we were lucky to be referred to a specialist so easily. I can honestly tell you it doesn’t happen this way for the most part.

I began this reflection that I showed to Pastor Dave with the title, “No Pain, No Gain”. I truly believe that these moments of pain are meant to teach us something about ourselves and possibly our faith.

I had gotten pregnant with Andrew when Paige was ten months old, and I must admit that, though Rich and I were happy, we kind of had a feeling of “oh man.” I now know, and I now believe, there was a reason that God made it possible for me to become pregnant again so quickly. I often wonder, what if I hadn’t been pregnant when Paige was diagnosed? I think about how different our lives could be. I know myself well enough to know that had I not already been pregnant, I probably wouldn’t have ever agreed to have another baby. How those feelings of hesitation would have changed the dynamics between Rich and myself. Where would he and I be now if all of this other stuff hadn’t happened? Where would our family be if we didn’t have Andrew?

I now believe that God put us through something with Paige when she was an infant to teach me a lesson about myself. It has taught me much about being a better person. It has taught me much about having faith in the fact that there is a reason for everything; good and bad. Unfortunately, we may not always be able to know the answers right away, and that’s ok. It’s not about getting the answers right away, it’s about figuring out what to do with the moments of opportunity God grants us, once we have reflected and discovered for ourselves what he wants from us.

I know God has big plans for Paige; the way she handles herself and copes with her auto-immune disease impresses many. She has helped many children newly diagnosed; I see that she has a huge capacity for nurturing and caring; hopefully she’ll discover that for herself someday. I have faith in the realization that God’s not done with me yet either. I have just begun to find my niche in this world. However, I also know there are moments and times of pain ahead; without it, I gain nothing. Without the pain of what we went through with Paige as a newborn and again as a toddler, I would be a much different person.

I gained so much about myself, about my family, my children once I allowed myself to reflect upon that pain that I felt from that very difficult year. 2001, though a difficult year, was a year of growth for me; spiritually and emotionally; without that pain, I would have gained nothing; instead I gained everything.

Thank you, Karen for sharing with us so poignantly some of the hidden gifts you discovered by going through a time of turmoil, confusion and fear.

Being overwhelmed by disruption and chaos takes us to the place of “letting go and letting God,” where a Higher Power than our own begins to rearrange the scrambled pieces of our lives into a bigger plan and a higher purpose than we could have seen before. Learning how to carry pain with acceptance gives us the capacity to walk with others in their pain, and to become agents of God’s healing and hope for them. Coming to terms with our own limitations brings us down a peg or two into a humility that helps us accept ourselves, other people, and life as we all are, which opens us to life as nothing else can. Realizing how much loss and death are an inescapable part of life motivates us to make a living connection between our immortal souls and our eternal God.

Because God has given us the capacity to experience these gifts, we can find a higher purpose in everything that happens to us, no matter how bad it may seem to us. Every pain is an opportunity to gain; every hard challenge is a chance to deepen and grow; even every loss is an invitation to tap into what can’t be lost.

How can a loving God allow “bad things” to happen to us? Really, how could a loving God not allow them? These challenges are the very things that help us grow from selfish, need-gratifying creatures into wise, creative, compassionate, faith-filled sons and daughters of God. And isn’t that what we’re really in this world for–to refine and temper and hone our souls until they reflect God’s own image?

I’m so thankful to Karen for sharing her story and reminding us of how our spirits deepen and develop, even through pain. I’m thankful for the challenges that have toppled my ego and become my greatest teachers. And I’m thankful for God’s mysterious, awesome power that works through our lives–especially through the hardest, darkest times–gently calling us to trust it, to let it work its way in us, to see that we are part of a plan that is vast, eternal–and in a deep, mysterious way, perfect just the way it is.