Thoughts from Mark "Hat" Rackley

The righteous person may have many troubles,
    but the Lord delivers him from them all;
he protects all his bones,
    not one of them will be broken.,

• Psalm 34:19-20

“Your own conduct and actions
    have brought this on you.
This is your punishment.
    How bitter it is!
    How it pierces to the heart!”

• Jeremiah 4:18

Well, I now know that my darling granddaughter is not like Jesus, someone who had no broken bones.  I always thought I had no broken bones, but then x-rays showed that they had been broken and then healed without need of being reset due to the tons of scars on the bones.

But I am getting ahead of myself.  When this comes out, it will be three weeks ago, but school had let out.  Both my son and his wife work.  So, they let my son’s in-laws take care of the three children.  But two children went in one direction (the farm) and one went in the other to the farmhouse, miles from the farm).  The farmhouse had a horse stable next door, and our granddaughter saddled a horse and went out for a ride.

She is ten.  She thought she needed no supervision.  The horse bucked and she fell.  She complained of pain in the rib cage.  And I was 850 miles away.

The hospital went through every type of imaging known to mankind, or so it seemed.  I requested all kinds of people to pray.  Was it a ruptured spleen?  A ruptured stomach?  Etc.

No, it was a cracked rib.  Nothing to be done except to let it heal.

My thought of the day is:  Is it not odd to send out an e-mail and tell everyone, “Great News!  God is good.  My granddaughter has a cracked rib.”

With each image being one more internal organ that might lead to emergency surgery and probably the family not making it to my wife’s memorial service when it was scheduled this late just so they could be here, just a cracked rib is great news.  God is indeed good.

Now, the “name it and claim it” folks might be screaming that I set my sights too low, but a little pain may be a bitter punishment.  But with that pain, the lesson that was learned sticks with her a little longer.  And when she must answer the question of “What did you do during your summer vacation?”, she can answer that she got bucked from a horse, got a cracked rib, had so many hospital images that I lost count, and then went on an 850-mile road trip to Pennsylvania and went to a full military honors internment ceremony at a National Cemetery within the first three weeks of the summer.  Can anybody beat that?!  Welcome to middle school, young lady.

And maybe for a lovely little girl, not having a scar to show off may not be a bad thing in the long run.

The bumps and bruises of life help us to learn.  God had all of that built in to make us who we are.  We need not complain about it.  We need to learn from it.

Soli Deo Gloria.  Only to God be the Glory.