If you were to ask me how many times that I knew God was with me, I would not be able to count all the stories or situations that I knew His presence was there, guiding me, comforting me, or even testing me. I have had my struggles, and He has always pulled me through. Today, I am going to explain about a time that my son Logan truly experienced God’s presence. I feel so lucky that I got to be with him as he experienced this.
To tell the story, I will need to backtrack a little. We were living in Europe when Logan was born and we had not found a church home while we lived there. The reason for that is because of my own shortcomings. I was afraid to walk into a church alone, and my own fears caused me to miss out on having a church family. I would explain to Logan about God, Jesus, and even Heaven, but I could not answer all of the questions he had. We eventually moved back to the United States, and his questions persisted. They got more intense, and, like most little kids, he would ask “why” to every answer I gave him. I realized, as I ran out of answers, I had been holding him back because of my own fear of doing something alone. By now my mother-in-law and nephew were living with our family, and we all agreed it was time to find a church to call our own. We finally found one, WellSpring Community Church, and I soon started to see the change in Logan.
Logan began to want to please God. He said he would not want to be mean to someone because God would not like it. He said he was thankful for Jesus for giving His life for him. It was an amazing transition to watch. Logan’s faith became real and he finally began to understand. Our family deciding to find a church was the best decision we ever made. Logan’s faith and trust in God were able to get him through the worst experience in his life thus far.
A few weeks ago Logan started showing symptoms of a stomach bug. He had a fever that would go back to normal after some medicine. I made an appointment on his second day of being sick. He was seen the next day. The doctor also thought that it was a viral stomach bug that needed to run its course. He gave me some warning signs to look for and we went home. The next morning, those signs he warned me about started to appear. Logan was too weak to walk from one room to another and I knew we had to go to the E.R. Once we were seen at the hospital, they ran some tests on him. He had come up positive for strands “A” and “B” of the flu. We were transferred to another hospital where he was admitted. The next day, we were also informed that Logan had two forms of food-poisoning bacteria inside of him. His little body was so weak. He had to fight both the two strands of the flu and two types of bacteria. Each invader he was fighting caused him to get severely dehydrated, which made his sugar and potassium levels drop way below normal. It was the scariest time of my life, and one would think, for his, too…but it wasn’t.
During his four-day stay at the hospital, Logan and I had many conversations. They all led back to God. My little five-year-old boy was somehow a man too wise for his years. It completely touched my heart to hear him talk. During one of our conversations, he told me he knew God was protecting him. He told me that God is there to protect us, and he said it with conviction. He said, “God loves us and protects us and that is the side I always want to be on”. Listening to him speak, I was such a proud mom to know he had a strong relationship with God. We also prayed very hard during his stay and had many people praying for his recovery. We knew all of our prayers would be answered. We knew God was watching over him.
If there is anything to take away from this, it is to not to let your fears consume you. I was afraid to take a step alone, and it cost my son from having a relationship with God for several years. It is so important to make sure our kids have a relationship with God. They need to know Him early on in life. It helps them get through the hard times on our life on Earth. If we had let our fears control us during his hospital stay, I am sure it would have been a more unpleasant visit. Logan still sometimes has questions about God and Jesus, but the majority of the time, he likes to tell me about God and Jesus. The ‘how ‘ and ‘why’ questions are asked less frequently, for he now talks about his love for them and their unending love for us. Prayer and faith helped him on his physical recovery, but his own personal relationship with God, even at the tender age of five, helped ease the anxiety he could have endured with what was going on.