When your world is turned upside down.

Monday just after lunch I was just getting changed and ready to go out and see a movie when my father called me.

He called to tell me he was being admitted to hospital because they thought there was a blockage in his heart. He had been having some chest pain, and had been to, and failed, a stress test that afternoon. I went and saw him last night and he seemed pretty ok, being monitored and having a procedure this morning to find the extent of the block.

We found out that he has 4 blocked arteries, one major block in the main artery and then 3 minor ones. I sat with him and Mum all day in his room waiting for the doctor to come with his course of action but he never came. I left about 90 minutes ago, and during the drive home everything has changed again.

The doctor conferred with a specialist, they both visited Dad and explained that a stint would be risky and possibly not a 100% solution in this case, so they then had a surgeon come in and walk Dad through the triple by-pass he will perform at 8am tomorrow morning.

This has all been so sudden that it is a great shock. The surgeon said that it is a miracle that Dad hasn't had a massive heart attack already with the blocks in his heart.

In a way that sums everything up, right from the point where all my plans changed with Dad's phone call, to right now knowing I won't see Dad again before he goes into the biggest surgery of his life, I know with 100% certainty that God has been in control of everything. In every painful aspect of this whole ordeal there has still been so many things to praise God for.

Emotionally I'm a wreck, but I don't think I have ever been more spiritually strong or covered by grace and love. All the theological 'mind-work' stuff I have learnt at college was today turned (by God) into a practical understanding to a point where I know the realness of what God is doing in this situation, and that no matter what I can praise his name.

So please be in prayer, our God is big and there is nothing that he cannot do. Yet praise God as well, because in the good and the bad God's grace covers all! And when your world is turned upside down, it is still apparently clear that God still holds that world in his hands!