We human beings do not like being limited.
At our core, we crave freedom from restraints, rules and red-tape laws. We do not like to be told what to do when we are truly honest with our carnal nature. In my opinion, only a miracle can change our desires into wanting what God has planned for us. God’s will.
As in the many platitudes we hear; “It’s God’s will.” Sometimes it is an accurate statement, others it is poorly-timed and very painful to hear. God has a “good and perfect” will, the Word tells us. In a culture that is upside down from living in surrender to the Almighty One we struggle inside with folding the two ideas of God’s goodness and our present suffering and pain.
It seems as though life is a long necklace of beads, each bead representing a different set of circumstances where limits are pressed upon us, usually against our will and very much to our dismay.
There was a day when I woke up to go to work at my church and could barely get dressed, my body shocked with pain. What could be wrong?
“You do not have rheumatoid arthritis”, my doctor had informed me six months earlier when I had made an appointment to see a rheumatologist. “Your blood test was negative.”
“So do I just run through the pain?”, I asked.
“Yep, just be sure to ice it down.”
I had been a runner my whole life and began to have pain in my left knee after working out. My wrist also had become misshapen and swollen after playing guitar for a women’s retreat for my church. That second night of the conference I barely slept, my right wrist twice its normal size and throbbing constantly. At first I blew it off as something normal, I was in my forties, after all, but the pain would naggingly come and go which drove me to my initial doctor inquiry.
Back to the woeful day I could barely get out of bed, I had to move sloooowly in order to not get jolts of pain, like hot pokers. My body was red and swollen in many places, I could not even get myself dressed. Stinging tears began rolling down my face. Upon seeing my doctor a second time, she gleefully announced that she just loved to see a “true flare-up”, almost clapping her hands with physician joy. I was speechless, thinking how so many times doctors forget that we surely don’t want to be there, half naked, sitting on the cold white paper.
“You are RA positive after all“, she told me. “I’ll start you on the first line of medication to see how you do”.
“How long to I have to take it?”, I asked.
“For life. There is no cure. It is a chronic, progressive disease.“
For some reason, my being a hopeless optimist didn’t prepare me for the weight of that statement. It felt like an axe had come down on me. I began to cry, desperately trying to stifle the feeling of suffocation that sad news births inside your chest. What even was RA anyway? I look back on that fateful day – I can remember it so clearly; May 9, 2012.
It was a cloudy day in Dallas.
They say when trauma occurs, the recipient can remember with photographic clarity some of the details surrounding that precise moment. The doctor’s lab coat was crooked at the collar. I can clearly see the framed license behind her head on the wall as she is talking to me. I can see my crumpled multicolored cloth purse in the chair next to me. I think in my soul I realized then that I was shaking hands with a new, forced-upon-me unknown; real suffering.
It turns out that I was spot on. I would suffer, and I would suffer A LOT.
I read in a library book that of the various types of arthritis, they term RA “the beast”. I agree completely. With RA, the beast will feign sleep, just long enough to let you think it’s not going to be so bad, that maybe you are going to be better, and then you hear the growl and snarl again. You feel its fang-like teeth sink into you. Again.
Three years from official diagnosis, I received the news that “Oh yeah, your numbers are through the roof,” after I had spent a family vacation in bed every single day. My family’s concern mixed with sadness and disappointment was palpable. I tell people that when you get sick you feel like you failed a test. You let others down, yourself down, plans are cancelled, accommodations are made, the many impositions, the inability to fix it, even inner shame. I learned to get used to the repeated news that yet another medication had not worked. “We’ll keep trying,” my doctors would say. My pain crises would come in waves. I would have to stop working, convalesce, attempt to work again. It was a series of stops and starts, multiple closed doors; my life’s space as I knew it was becoming very limited. I would walk by a row of running shoes at the store and want to cry. I would see joggers on the street and covet. I would cry a thousand tears when I could no longer play the bass guitar with my husband, watching him like a train taking off without me.
It took 10 years before we managed to find a medication that would improve my symptoms. Then it would stop helping and I would switch yet again. The beast always came back.
“You’re the typical aggressive RA case… there are no good medications for treating fatigue.” My days kept rolling by, and yet God always, incredibly, mercifully, graciously, stayed close to me. I never stopped reading His promises, never stopped praying. He never stopped loving me, walking with me.
He has taught me so much through the humiliation and also the blessing of being sick. My two children have grown up with a “sick mom”, and suffered alongside me valiantly. My brothers and sisters in Christ have loved me well, carried me, in fact, with their loving prayers. The treasures of testimonies of the saints that have gone before us always console and strengthen me. The great beautiful Kingdom of Heaven dwarfs my suffering, shrinks it down to a pitiful size. Our present sufferings are nothing compared to the glory in Christ Jesus that awaits us.
My tears were real.
My pain was real.
My losses were real.
Here is what I slowly learned:
With God, a closed door is always a path to a new one. I could no longer run, but I could swim. I could no longer play my guitar, but I could quietly draw and paint, which gave me great creative joy. God’s sweet breath on my hands. Even with the pain.
For some reason my mind has thought a lot of Jonah in the belly of the fish during these last 14 years.
I think it is how I feel sometimes, curled up under my blankets in the dark, with only my breathing to listen to, my bed almost moving up and down in sea current. Jonah’s space in the fish was no doubt cramped, terrifying, pitch black and mortal. Yet even there, in the knowledge he had run from God’s plan, the Lord was with him. I believe God must have shown Jonah light to comfort him. There, in that slimy pit, a warm light, I like to imagine. Maybe even some small twinkles, like the starry night sky.
“I called out to the Lord in my distress, and He answered me,” says Jonah 2.2a.
Whatever space you are sitting in, cramped up, or stretched out; remember you can call on the Lord and He will meet you exactly where you are.
Olive Wire 