grace that comes before

One thing I love about Methodism is the belief in prevenient grace. The beautiful idea that divine love precedes any and all of our conscious decisions. The steadfast hope that God always goes before us, making a way before we even know that we need one.

Two weekends ago my dearest friend from college flew me out to Durham. We try to see each other once a year if possible and my birthday was as good excuse as any to get a visit in. Lauren and I ate great meals, chaperoned a 12-year-old boy's sleepover, hiked along the Eno, cheered as the underdog Duke women's volleyball game upset the undefeated conference champs, threw a little party and laughed and talked and laughed and talked.

The week before I left, Andrew and I both had ended up in bed with Elliott on two separate nights and both accidentally fell asleep after soothing his bad dream or whatever wakened him. And we both were awoken around 4 a.m. to Elliott having a seizure.

We know that Elliott has had seizures in his sleep in the past. This summer we saw a neurologist who took him through a whole battery of awful tests to try to determine the specifics of these episodes. But the results were inconclusive. Although he had a 20-minute seizure while enduring an EEG, nothing abnormal showed up. The best the neurologist could offer was a drug trial. For many reasons, we decided to wait. My gut said that testing anticonvulsants on our son was not the answer.

For months, after upping his B6 intake and making some other small changes to his diet, we thought perhaps the four seizures we had seen in a 3-month period over the summer were a fluke. The week we slept with our son, however, alerted us that the episodes were probably happening a lot more often than we imagined. But we had no idea how to find a neurologist who would be able to look at Elliott's condition any differently, and who wouldn't subject him to the same barbaric EEG testing regimen, only to come up empty-handed again.

So, I went to Durham, looking forward to the break and some quiet time to both think and forget.

During my visit, Lauren had invited a bunch of women from work and church to come over for a party on Saturday night. Although I knew a few of her friends, most were new to me. One woman was very quiet. It seemed clear that she didn't know many people either. So I started talking to her. She told me her friend had invited her to come along and she didn't know anyone there, including Lauren. Somehow we got onto the topic of work and she told me that she was a clinical dietician for an epilepsy center. That she worked for one of the top pediatric neurologists at Duke.

As we talked, I shared about Elliott, his condition and his seizures, and our uncertainty about what to do next. She told me to give me her email address and she would ask the neurologist who we should see in Chicago. And I knew that this moment—where I fly halfway across the country to meet a woman at a party who wasn't even known by the hostess—was a moment divinely arranged long before I could have ever known I needed it.

The party woman emailed me a couple days after I returned home with the name of a neurologist at the University of Chicago who specializes in both cerebellum issues and seizure disorder. After looking him up online, I discovered that the U of C Children's Hospital is one of the few in the world with non-invasive EEG technology that pinpoints even the peskiest seizure disorders. And, miraculously, I connected to the department in one ring and was able to get an appointment the first week of January with a specialist who normally schedules new patient appointments 6-8 months out. Even the scheduler was surprised.

Some may call it coincidence, serendipity or simply good luck. But more and more I am seeing that God goes before us, making a way before we even know we need it. Prevenient grace. Divine love. Whatever it's called, I just see one more amazing gift to be thankful for.