Secrets and solutions?

This morning in my daily Bible reading, I was studying the Old Testament book of Amos. There's a verse (Amos chapter 3 verse 7) which says that God reveals plans and secret things to his prophets. In fact, we see this often in the Old Testament: that God gives insight and understanding to his servants (Moses, Abraham, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, etc) about things that are happening or going to happen. A favourite verse of mine - Psalm 25 verse 14 - says that the Lord shares his "secrets" with people who love and respect him. It wasn't just something for the Old Testament days, but is something that we can still experience today. The New Testament uses a variety of different words to describe this experience of hearing from God: a word of knowledge, a word of wisdom, a word of "prophecy." But these terms can sound sort of religious, and sometimes they obscure the simplicity of just hearing God speak to us in the quietness of our hearts.

Some years ago, when I was moving back to Europe from Africa, a very meaningful scripture for me was Deuteronomy 29 verse 29. It says that, "The secret things belong to the Lord, but the revealed things belong to us and our children, so that we can obey God's instructions." It's a fact of life that there are many things we simply do not know or understand.... but the things we do know and understand are the things we need to hold on to and obey. I may not know the source of my Dad's ongoing tummy pain and nausea; I may not understand why he's spending so many weeks in hospital and struggling with so many setbacks.... but I do know that God is good and that he promises us His presence and His strength in difficult situations.

Just as I was writing these thoughts in my journal, back came another thought that had flitted through my mind over the past couple of days. The thought was "lactose intolerance." It had first come to mind as I watched Dad struggling with stomach cramps and vomiting on Christmas Day. I had even spoken to his nurse yesterday and asked whether critical illness could be a trigger for lactose intolerance. She said she wasn't aware that this could be the case, and that Dad has been drinking milk for the past two months - since starting to take things orally again. As I thought about it again this morning, I realised that it's been three or four weeks now that Dad has been eating hardly anything and only drinking milk... and over these weeks he has increasingly complained about tummy pain. Could this thought about lactose intolerance perhaps be an impression from God, an insight into something that doctors hadn't considered as the source of Dad's discomfort?

Well, not being a healthcare expert, I had to resort to the 21st century's source of information for laypeople: I googled lactose intolerance to see if I could find out further information about it. The first thing I discovered was a list of four or five symptoms that pretty much described what Dad has experienced over the past weeks. And right there, at the top of the list of possible causes of lactose intolerance in adults was: bowel surgery. Two or three different websites said that bowel surgery or intestinal infection (Dad's had both of them since his surgery nine weeks ago) are common triggers for lactose intolerance in adults. This seemed like too much of a coincidence. Could God be drawing our attention to something relatively simple that just happened to have eluded doctors amidst the many other complications that Dad's been facing over the past nine weeks?

I was of course hesitant to give the impression that I was trying to tell the doctors their job, but I felt that I needed to be obedient to an impression that seemed as if it could be from the Lord, so I phoned the hospital and shared my concern with Dad's nurse. I asked her to check with the consultants whether they felt it might be worth doing a blood test or a hydrogen breath test to check whether lactose might be the culprit behind the pain he's been experiencing. "That's interesting," said the nurse, "Because he told us he doesn't have any pain today, and he actually had a glass of cold water instead of a glass of milk this morning."

When we arrived at the hospital this afternoon, the nurse told us that the consultant said he thought it was unlikely that milk could be the cause of the problem and he didn't think it was worth doing a test for lactose intolerance. But the nurse was pleased to report to us that Dad was doing well today and had had a pain free morning. So you can imagine our surprise when we went into Dad's room and he told us that he was struggling with the tummy pain again. I looked at his chart to see what he had eaten at lunch time and, sure enough, he had drunk a glass of milk just about an hour before we arrived. Despite the fact that the doctor had been unconvinced, we shared our thought with Dad and suggested that he avoid drinking milk for a few days, just to see if it makes any difference to the discomfort he's been experiencing. When his dietician came in just then, she agreed that it wouldn't do any harm to "experiment" for a few days to see if it makes a difference. She took a marker pen and wrote on his whiteboard: "No milk allowed for the next 2 or 3 days."  So I guess now we just need to wait and see whether this might be the secret to the solution as far as Dad's pain is concerned.