When my neck began its new level of intense pain, I held the hope that I could quickly get surgery to alleviate this pain that makes me want to heave my guts up. Well, as I’ve already shared with you, that hope fell by the wayside, for at least six months.
Then the surgeon gave me a new hope; one that could maybe alleviate my pain temporarily until I could have the surgery. THAT hope, too, flew out the window, for the same reason as the surgery had.
I’m sitting here early this morning, having been awakened by my neck’s screams of pain, thinking over a post Sara Frankl wrote recently for a site called (in)Courage. (http://gitzengirl.blogspot.com/2010/07/incourage-stutter-steps.html) She made a comment in it that has stuck with me…about how she had trained as a hurdle-jumper in her school days and had learned how to take four stuttered steps instead of the normal three so that when she had to run into the wind, she would still be able to make the leap.
She said there, that she got to the point where she didn’t need the “break” of the wind blowing at her back. And she said she’s gotten to the point now in her life and illness where she has ceased to need/expect a break, because it often just isn’t there. She can still run and compete successfully without it.
Paul said we are to beat our bodies and bring them into subjection so that we can successfully run the race before us. Well, I haven’t really had to beat my body up; rather it has beaten ME up. Maybe my problem is not so much my body, but my mind which is still searching for that “break.” It has not so much been the pain and the physical suffering that I’ve been through that I’ve struggled to deal with (although, Lord knows, that hasn’t been easy either)…but the restriction and limitation on my life and daily activities. It has been the talents, hobbies and art which has slipped through these knobby fingers never to return.
At some point I stopped looking at my current problem as a “temporary setback” from which I would recover and be on my merry way. I began to realize that my body is pitted against me and that any kind of trouble it can find to raise, it WILL raise.
I’ve wondered why this is. My husband has repeatedly suggested (and not always very kindly) that I NEED these illnesses; that they are who I am. I’ve thought about this a lot…and I really don’t think that this is it. Because I had (and sometimes still HAVE) a hard time accepting my role as someone with poor health. I keep expecting to spring up from this sickbed and take life by storm once again. Even now, I am looking into going back to school for a bachelors in dietary science and nutrition in hopes of finding some kind of career that I can manage…and I wonder if I am just kidding myself.
Is it right not to concede; not to give up hope? Or am I only setting myself up for continual and bitter disappointment? I am at an odd age. I’m 47; no longer young, but still not old…still at an age where I should have lots of life in front of me. I fluctuate between anticipating and planning for that life and begging God just to bring me to His kingdom and get it over with.
The past ten years have been filled with every conceivable medical problem and complication….When I think of ten MORE years of this and worse, I want to lie down and cry. I think that there is no way I will have the strength to manage that. But I have learned that God doles out strength on a daily and not a yearly basis. Sometimes, as He has been in my dealings with this incredible pain, he metes it out second by second as I lay gasping and praying for the strength to survive another minute.
So, I’ve been talking about hope; hope extinguished. But if I am to live true to the title of this post, I need to talk about inextinguishable hope. It is true that the human spirit was born to hope. It is only after we concede to years of disappointment and to the whispers of despair and bitterness which come, that we can LOSE that hope. But still, even the worst cynic; even the atheist must still have enough hope to continue to live another day…Someone said that “hope springs eternal in the human breast” and I think this is true.
Even in my days of suicidal despair…I still hoped enough to look for help at the last minute (sometimes…and when I didn’t, God took over from there.) But I didn’t just lay down in a heap and refuse to even participate in this disappointment of a life…because something in me HOPED. Something in me, knew that THIS IS NOT ALL THERE IS.
That last phrase has been like a mantra in my writings…and it has bannered across my mind in my moments of most bitter pain or disappointment.
And I think God has built us this way. This hope carries us through our moments of despair, suffering, pain and disappointment…It propels us to pick ourselves up and try again when all seem hopeless. So whether we get a “break” or not…whether the wind is blowing at our backs or we have a hurricane gale coming against us; we can continue to run because we have this knowledge of something greater – greater than ourselves; greater than our lives – but in which our lives have a part and a role. Our bodies and our hearts cling to life…because we know deep down that we were made for life. And I believe that we know, deep down, regardless of how hard we try to convince ourselves otherwise, that this life is not all there is and that we are significant—to Somebody.
And that Somebody will continue to grant us the hope and strength to keep running and to keep leaping those hurdles. Sometimes he tests and develops our strength by giving us bigger hurdles and harder winds in our faces, but the hope burning in our hearts never ceases and gives us the energy to continue despite the setbacks and challenges.
And this hope fully relies on Love, on God’s love, to empower it….because if we did not know, or at least suspect, that we are greatly loved, then this hope would not only be weak, it would be a cruel farce…because we would run and leap, endlessly and with great difficulty…for WHAT? It is only the hope of being loved by, and loving in return, our Creator, which can fuel and energize us in our darkest moments.
“Three things will last forever: Faith, Hope and Love,…but the greatest of these is Love.” 1 Cor. 13:13
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