Don't Mess with Me

Sometimes you don’t want anyone messing with you. My 80-year-old father-in-law has reached that point. He jerked out all the tubes yesterday and insisted on going home. He is in ICU.

ICU stands for intensive care unit. It’s a place where people care for you very carefully, constantly, and intimately. They care so much that you have almost no privacy—well, no privacy, period. They care for you 24 hours a day so you cannot really sleep unless they give you a pill that keeps you under when they’re fooling with your IV, taking your blood pressure and temperature, and checking the beeping machine at 2 a.m.

It really is intensive.

And it’s a lot to put up with, especially when you are old and hurting and want to go home.

Jesus said to Peter, “When you were younger you dressed yourself and went where you wanted; but when you are old you will stretch out your hands, and someone else will dress you and lead you where you do not want to go” (John 21:18).

There you go. It’s the perfect description of old age. And you arrive there remembering the times when you were in charge, in control of the thundering machines, and nobody messed with you.

You stretch out your hands. It’s an act of surrender. Those still-powerful hands have held the babies, gripped the plow, pulled the levers, steered that 18-wheeler around the mountains, wielded the iron wrench that turned the stubborn valve, and cracked a thousand other counter-forces through sheer will power and physical strength.

I remember when Jack tried to teach me how to “peel pecans” with a pocketknife. I saw him cutting through those shells like butter, taking out the meat in whole sections, and I wanted to do the same. I took his knife and cut up my thumb, but my hands weren’t strong enough to push that sharp knife through the wooden shell. I realized again how strong his hands were.

Now they stretch out, palms up, and yield to the demands of the tiny nurse at the bedside. When days have passed and the drugs are coursing through your tired veins and you don’t know whether its sunup or sundown and nothing makes much sense anymore, that’s when you stretch out your hands and let them lead you where you do not want to go.

The faces bob around you, faces of people who really care intensely for you, frantic to help you out of your pain and into tomorrow. But you know—and they know—that all the tests and medicines in the world can’t really fix what’s wrong with you.

Peter was upset about the Lord’s comments to him. He saw John and asked, “What about him?”

And Jesus replied, “That’s not your business. You follow me.”

And so, in the end, we come back to the beginning. We yield to the One who started us on the journey of faith and promise. We follow the one who called us years ago. We continue to do exactly what we have done for all these years.

We trust and obey. We turn our palms upward and go where we are led. We follow, not the nurse or the family, but the Lord himself who walks before us and beside us all the way Home.