The Immortal Story
By Miguel Guanipa (12/16/06)
A few years ago my wife and I had to rush our two year old beautiful daughter to the Hospital. She had been vomiting uncontrollably for hours and was unable to hold any food in her stomach; it seemed we had spent an entire day fighting an uphill battle in our efforts to keep her hydrated.
She had stopped vomiting upon our arrival to the emergency room so we guardedly waited a few hours by her side to see if we could begin feeding her again. Eventually it seemed that the illness had ebbed its way out of her system and we started giving her small doses of apple juice and crackers. But to our great dismay, just when it seemed that she had begun to turn the corner she was seized by another violent vomiting spree.
At that point the nurses decided that it would be best to put her on an intravenous feed so that she could at least begin to get some type of nutrients into her body and avoid a dangerous state of dehydration.
The nurse assigned to administer the IV appeared somewhat inexperienced in her role and I was asked to physically restrain my daughter as she tried to find a vein in her arm using the needle as the locator. As my daughter bled from the nurse’s first few unsuccessful attempts at insertion I looked intently into her frightened eyes, hoping that my heartrending gaze would deliver the assurance that this grueling journey would soon be over; for both of us.
It had been a long and exhausting day and I could barely stand and simply watch my daughter writhing in pain with the little strength she had left in her small frail body. And then, she looked at me through her tears, her eyes unmistakably evoking a silent yet urgent plea: Dad, when is this going to end?
Dad, when is this going to end?
The message of Christmas is poignantly encapsulated in a similarly stirring appeal from the one Christians call the Son of God; the moment when Jesus cries out to the Father during his agonizing trek in the Garden of Gethsemane: “My Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass away from me”.
I wouldn’t ordinarily think of this narrative as a jolly Christmas story, but as I have pondered it, it spoke to me wonderfully about what its central message entails; for I know first hand that there is nothing more agonizing for a father than to see his children suffer, though my family’s plight infinitely pales in comparison with what the family of God endured that fateful day.
It was the Father who held his own accursed son down as he was viciously beaten by his captors. It was the Father who watched as his son hung on the tree bawling in anguish until he gave his last breath, knowing that his seeming inability to intervene was only a voluntary yet wrenching surrender to allow the plan of salvation to proceed. His agony must have been so great, it is said that when Jesus cried on the cross that his Father had forsaken him, the Father had turned away, sickened by the sight of his own son languishing in pain; thence the world was covered in darkness for 3 hours after Jesus expired.
Dad, when is this going to end? There it was. Jesus cry to his father: “My Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass away from me”.
The message of Christmas is that someone suffered and died that we might live. But in the midst of this agony there was complete surrender in the part of the one who suffered and the one who relinquished the subject of sacrifice so that the process of redemption which had been put in motion before the world began could run its full course.
This is why Jesus if often referred in the scriptures as “The Lamb of God”. The supremely acceptable sacrifice for the father could have been offered only by the father himself; it was the highest price that could be paid. Thus the Son rose again to eternal life, and the gift of eternity with him was proffered to the world.
For my part a more experienced nurse was finally able to properly insert the IV in my daughter’s arm, and before the night was over, we were able to take a tired but healthier little girl back home.
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