Pushing Through The Rough Patches

It seems lately that I keep climbing out of one crises into another. It is exhausting! I’m not sure if it was a gallstone attack or I caught some kind of a intestinal virus; but two weeks ago for 4 days I was in a complete nightmare. If you are in a wheelchair, you know exactly what I’m talking about. Even after the original symptems stopped, the gut cramping and bladder spasms pursisted. I really couldn’t eat anything for another week and it has only been the last 3 or 4 days that I have felt like I’m returning to my normal self.

I have had some really important reminders these past few weeks to the times in my life when I feel like I am pushing through the rough patches of life. It maybe just a reflective post but, I thought I’d share some of the words that have carried me through the survival of the past few days…

Move Slowly

Perhaps the most anguishing of my feelings was that I really don’t have time for this. It seems like I have been putting everything off for so long and I just want to get back at it. Even more truthfully, I am scared that if I stop moving… stop working out, stop driving, stop doing the house work, stop my transfers… I’m going to loose the abilities entirely. Perhaps it is vaniety too but, I also can’t help but feel ashamed at letting people down by not connecting with them or canceling, yet again, a planned visit or speaking engagement. I just don’t want to slow down.

Lately, I’ve been really getting into the 2nd half of Philip Yancey’s book ‘Disapointment With God’. He’s been digging into the story of Job where he articulated in the last chapter that:

“In our century, it takes faith to believe that a human being amounts to more than a combination of DNA programming, instincts of the gene pool, cultural conditioning, and the impersonal forces of history. Yet even in this behaviorist century, we want to believe differently. We want to believe that the thousand hard and easy choices we make each day somehow count. And the Book of Job insists that they do; one person’s faith can make a difference. There is a role for human beings, after all, and by fulfilling that role Job set a pattern for anyone who ever faces doubt or hardship.”

— Disappointment with God: Three Questions No One Asks Aloud by Philip Yancey

As I contemplated the lethargic and slow reality of Job’s character just sitting there, scratching his wounds with shards of clay being an embodiment of faith as he waited upon God, I was perplexed at his willingness to accept his innosense within the acts of nothingness. It seemed even his friends demanded he demonstrate faith that services the fervancy and demands of this world and yet Job is granted a sense of purpose to the act of stillness. Similarily, the Psalmist also found gravatas in God’s words, “Be still and know that I am God.” (Psalm 46:10)

It wasn’t easy but, I found that as I slowed down and let God, healing began to take hold. New strength came not in my doing, but in my willingness to be still and wait.

Fight The Good Fights That Need Fighting For

I can’t really say what depths of my imagination these words came from but, it was a week ago that I wrote the words down to myself that rough patches make for muddy paths that have long been traveled. “Fight the good fight” means working through those muddied well worn paths to open them back up again. We do not find well worn paths, unless we continue to tread on them; even when the path gets muddy.

A few nights before this, I brokedown in complete depression and a waterfall of tears. I had gone to transfer into bed and found my body to be so weak that I couldn’t transfer our of my chair. I would end up having to depend on the help of my care aid with the cieling lift to transfer me in for the night. After working so hard to get my transfer back a few years ago, I thought the fight was over and I had lost.

Feeling so defeated, I also didn’t feel I was being fair. After all, there are many people with disabilities who have never been able to transfer themselves. I found myself asking the question, “When is it the right time to let my transfer go?” I’ve always known that at some point in my aging I would no longer be able to do this. But, is now the time? And, how do I learn to accept this?

Then those words came to me… Fight the good fight, Erik! I realized, I have fought through this path of independance so many times that I know the steps to take. If I walk the same path, as dark and hard as it may seem, the results are one of accepted success whether I am able to transfer again or not. The answers layed not in the depths of this moment, but in the ways I choose to move forward.

For When You Need To Hold On Or Let Go

God, sometimes it feels like a better person wouldn’t be like this:
tethered to so many hopes,
and fears, and expectations.

Blessed are we pulled between wanting to let go
—sometimes needing to let go—and also needing to hold on.

Blessed are we when we yearn
for connection and love and touch.

Blessed are we when we hunger
for the beauty of life itself and the people to fill it.

Blessed are we when we are unable to say,
“I’m letting it go.”
Because we feel like we will be washed away into an ocean of nothingness.
Teach us to cling to the truths that enliven our spirits,
and loosen our grip on the painful untruths:
like the one that says we are alone, or unlovable.
Or that desire itself is the enemy.
Teach us to hunger for what is good, and be filled.

There will be no easy addition and subtraction.
We will lose and we will gain,
and almost none of it will make much sense at the time,
and it will force our hands open.
In the ebb and flow of wins and losses, comings and goings,
may we look for the divine in the mystery of it all,
the stubbornness of flowers that still smile at us in the grocery store,
and the need for endless small reminders
that the pain of it all, the comedy of it all,
will point us back to love.

— Bowler, Kate; Richie, Jessica. The Lives We Actually Have: 100 Blessings for Imperfect Days (pp. 178-179). The Crown Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

Don’t Forget To Love Myself

I won’t lie to you. A little more then a week ago I said all sorts of viel and horrible things to myself.

• It’s no wonder you can’t transfer. Your too fat.
• Your not working out enough.
• Your independence is over and you may as well give up.
• You eat to much.

I could probably go on but, you get the picture. I had forgot to love myself. Wrapped up in my grief within the moment, I needed the words of K.J. Ramsey to remind me:

“Grief does not cancel out goodness. Hurt does not silence all hope. Our wounds bring us to the intersection of grace, where hurt and hope are held in the scarred and tender hands of Christ. Jesus holds the paradoxes of your past, present, and future in indivisible love. Every paradox in your life is an invitation to be held, for it is in sensing Christ’s scars that we learn to rise with ours. Held in the center of his encompassing grace, you are being made capable of beholding the center of everything.”

— The Lord Is My Courage: Stepping Through the Shadows of Fear Toward the Voice of Love by K.J. Ramsey

It is important for me to acknowledge the hurt I was feeling while being honest to the feelings I had. But it is also equally important that I acknowledge God’s love for me beyond the struggles of my grief. The truth to my last point overlaps here were I need to fight the good fight, acknowledge the changes that can be made to good physical health. But I also must keep good psychological and spiritual practices in loving myself for the sake of God’s desire over me. The struggles of this world are not overcome through my self realizations or irrational judgements; but through the acknowledged realization that Christ walks alongside me, embracing me, and even carrying me when life seems impossible. Even when I can’t seem to love myself, I can know that God still does.

Which kind of reveals my last revelation to pushing through the rough patches of life…

Don’t Confuse Life With God

It was just a few days ago but, I found this story from Yancey to be truly compelling and encouraging. In soome ways, I have felt very similar over the years. It was a reminder that not everything in life is fair, but God’s goodness never changes.

If you’ve come this far in my post, I can share with you that yes, I am doing better and my transfers have returned; along with my strength. But I want to leave you with the same story that has been so powerful a reminder to me to keep hold of God’s goodness even in the rough patches of life. I hope it bring you encouragement during those times, too.

I described my book on disappointment with God. “Could you tell me about your own disappointment?” I asked. “What have you learned that might help someone else going through a difficult time?”

Douglas was silent for what seemed like a long time. He stroked his peppery gray beard and gazed off beyond my right shoulder. I fleetingly wondered if he was having a mental “gap.” Finally he said, “To tell you the truth, Philip, I didn’t feel any disappointment with God.”

I was startled. Douglas, searingly honest, had always rejected easy formulas like the “Turn your scars into stars!” testimonials of religious television. I waited for him to explain.

“The reason is this. I learned, first through my wife’s illness and then especially through the accident, not to confuse God with life. I’m no stoic. I am as upset about what happened to me as anyone could be. I feel free to curse the unfairness of life and to vent all my grief and anger. But I believe God feels the same way about that accident — grieved and angry. I don’t blame him for what happened.”

Douglas continued, “I have learned to see beyond the physical reality in this world to the spiritual reality. We tend to think, ‘Life should be fair because God is fair.’ But God is not life. And if I confuse God with the physical reality of life — by expecting constant good health, for example — then I set myself up for a crashing disappointment.

“God’s existence, even his love for me, does not depend on my good health. Frankly, I’ve had more time and opportunity to work on my relationship with God during my impairment than before.”

There was a deep irony in that scene. For months I had been absorbed in the failures of faith, having sought out stories of people disappointed in God. I had chosen Douglas as my modern Job, and had expected from him a bitter blast of protest. The last thing I anticipated was a graduate-school course in faith.

“If we develop a relationship with God apart from our life circumstances,” said Douglas, “then we may be able to hang on when the physical reality breaks down. We can learn to trust God despite all the unfairness of life. Isn’t that really the main point of Job?”

— Yancey, Philip. Disappointment with God: Three Questions No One Asks Aloud (pp. 203-204). Zondervan. Kindle Edition.