So there I was, covered from head to toe in flea bites. “Itching” was a thing I’d thought I understood; now I knew more, better. I’d learned my utter misunderstandings up to that point, how “itchy” was a thing I’d never felt the full brunt of. Not ten, or five, percent, even. Those bites numbered in the hundreds and I could feel every single one driving me towards madness. I felt the tiny beasts that were feasting on my flesh leaping from where I was scratching, ripping my own skin up like modly, old carpet.

I say this, knowing you may be disgusted. Not hoping you’ll be, but wishing you to understand.

I was staying at my parent’s place, my nineteenth summer alive, because my appendix had just been removed. I was stitched up long-ways near my right hip, a remnant of the “old school” slice-’em-open method of removing bursting appendixes. Nowdays, you’ll most likely end up with two small holes and a functioning middle section. I was not blessed with such a tiny scar, a reminder of our modern medical system. My mother (may she really rest in peace) thought they’d allowed it to burst, due to the doctor being drunk and stoned that day. After all, it had been on July 4th, in the middle of golden seas of Iowa corn fields, going hours in all directions. We lived nowhere wildly developed, and that day, I paid a price for the quiet lifestyle my parents had hoped in.

What was I to expect, waiting in the ER for seven hours? For a sober, clear-minded doctor? One who would surely allow me morphine, since I was in agony, while he drove across the state trying to sober up? To be fair, he arrived just after the seventh hour of waiting passed, only to deliver a short-jab (punch) to my abdomen to see if I was faking. Yes, the “weeping kid brought in by his weeping dad” routine on national holiday, you’ve seen that, right? Once sure I was actually dying, he took his odorous body to prepare for surgery, and I finally had some tiny bit of hope. Until they rolled my bed out of the room and down the hall, every little bump forcing me to scream out in unbelievable pain.

That day, the illusion of a Pain “10 Scale” was shattered. It went well past fifteen while I still believed, for some reason, that it would stop at “10.” I was tough, in my own mind, but anything past three or four was too much for me, and I went about seeking solutions. Asking for medicines, pondering ways to get past or away from the pain. When it hit “8” I was stunned, the tears running down my horrified face. When it hit “10,” I thought I understood the true horrors so often described in literature and media. Once it went onward, I began to sink into myself, losing all hope, tossed overboard from a ship I’d self-constructed in my mind. The ship was named “Uneducated Optimism.”

So I’d gotten out and gotten home. My parents were living in a tour bus full of laptops selling Christian software for schools and homeschools, and were bopping about the nation. My sister, her two children, and I were all living in their home while they were gone. My sister decided to take in some kittens that had recently been born underneath our house, as her kids wished. A week or so later, we were overrun. Two weeks later, I was able to move a bit better with the long gash in my tummy, but now the new problem had shown it’s unholy head.

The fleas were more at home than we were, thanks to those kittens. We sprayed and hoped, dropped bug bombs and went out for the day, hoping they’d cease to be a nuisance. The kittens kept coming in and being put out; and eventually there was a moment that I’ll place gently here, to help you understand the title.

The cherished kitten was white and orange. The kids loved it the most, and had decided in secret to give it a collar. The collar, unbeknownst to me or my sister, was a clear, near-invisible hair-tie. You begin to see what’s coming, yet you can’t stop it. Neither could we. We didn’t know or understand. Kneeling over the kitten’s cold, dead form, the reason was found. Too late by a day or so. He’d been fighting to hard against what we thought was an invisible disease, something he’d gotten from being outside.

Bringing him inside is what killed the little fellow. Plus, the fleas rode in on the back of that little fellow, and his siblings. I was tortured to a very sharp end, while recovering, and they, too, suffered from the fleas. All that immense suffering, splattered with a tragic ending, all because we couldn’t just leave things be. Understand the plan. Grasp that what was, was for a number of very specific reasons.

God is good. I know, for a fact, He stood there in the room and let the children accidentally strike down the kitten. He let my sister and I, confused and infuriated by the flea uprising, miss the little invisible “collar” that slowly strangled it to death. My sis’s kids weren’t evil or intentionally bad, thus, I see no sin or wrong in what they’d try to do. They just did something sweet very wrong. Their lovely naivety led to the death of the pet they’d welcomed in, fleas included.

That wasn’t the worst time of my life, yet there were moments where I felt devastated. Lost, alone, half-mad with “what’s causing this” and “why won’t You help us?” Overtaken by the sheer helplessness of it all, I could have wandered off the God road and gone anywhere. Eventually, I’d find all sorts of troubles with which to distract myself. Yet there, I was awakened to both pain and despair, the kind of ache that didn’t just live inside me, but on the faces of the little ones I loved, too. Yet God was there, and He let those things happen. None of us died, that summer.

I got back to the city and went to collect my last check (I’d been fired for staying home during my recovery) and they said they’d never been sent one from corporate. I’d planned to use that money to survive, get groceries, keep on the path. I did not get it that weekend, or ever, at all. At the time, it was under $200, but it felt like so much worse a blow than “just money.” It felt like the icing on the cake of devastation, the reason to abandon God or hope or whoever or whatever was telling me to “just pray about it.”

Yet I didn’t, and haven’t. That’s honestly not a brag, more a statement of understanding that God isn’t a vending machine or ATM, that He’s not my version of perfect. He’s His version of Perfect and I can’t grasp what it takes as a God to let His child suffer that much, and NOT let me be free or helped the moment I asked.

I sat, wide-eyed and broke, after all that, in my rented room in the city. It felt so lonely, to pray and not yell at God. Some say He can handle some yelling and screaming, some humanity. He designed it, after all. I can understand those folks, truly. I just don’t agree. In all the suffering and pain I thought I was eating, there was a slender thread of truth that I can now see more clearly: I survived. God let me rise from the hospital bed after the surgery and ensured I had a place to go after fleeing my parent’s home overrun by fleas. Truthfully, they could have followed me in my laundry. They didn’t. After a bit of adjusting and quiet time, I was fine.

Yep, I could have been done with Him, as if that the dead kitten was the final straw, or the owed money I never got. No, I didn’t say any such grumpy stuff, because God’s God to me, and I’m not on His level of “getting it” and I don’t dare tell Him I do. I don’t get to judge Him. He’d hear me out, likely, without sending hail or lightning, yet He’d simply know better. Like a parent knows a child isn’t wise enough or strong enough TO understand them, we cannot MAKE ourselves GET GOD. We’re not on His plane of thinking, or being. He’s the One with the answers, and we shall always bear the questions and fears. The faith He says we need, the faith that only grows from trusting Him in suffering.

Before my wife, before I had kids, I sat in that rented room and cried. I shouted in my pillow and thrashed some, as I had other times, for other reasons. I was frail, confused, and very, very human. The beauty of God being God is, He saw me for what I was: His creation, His kid. He did not deny my sufferings and tears. He did not ever promise me an easy or perfect life. What He did offer, which is the take-away to all of this, was that He still reigned in the universe, and in my life.

Some may ask “who wants a ruler who lets you suffer” and I would gently reply, “who knows how much suffering makes you stronger versus how much destroys you?” My God did not let me die, then, and I’m still hear, twenty years later. I find that bonkers and thought-provoking. Maybe you’ve never had fleas or surgery, or any such thing. More likely, though, you’ve been through the dark nights, the lonely moments, and you’re still here, reading this. I believe, no, I know, that it was for a reason.

His.

Good talk.