Archive for the The Journey Category

My teeth were chattering but I was not cold. The ache radiated from inside my muscles like hot coals. I tossed another clump of hair into the trash can—one more reminder that my body could not tolerate the shock and horror of what had happened. My broken heart was beyond the reach of pain relievers and so I sat and shivered in the darkness. I sucked on my tears and wondered if the day would ever come that they would cease.

Have you ever had a pain so big and so lasting that you felt your body falling apart? Have you turned off the television because the images only added to your misery? Have you considered the options and despaired? The human body has a great capacity for pain. Our sensitive nerve endings remind us in quiet, unrelenting moments just how delicate we are. We watch as the young and healthy around us run and play. If we were once young and nimble, we grieve for what was. If we have never known that kind of carefree flight, we groan with envy. We stare at the strong arms of young lovers as they embrace and we sorrowfully remember how it felt to be cherished and adored.

What do we do with that kind of pain? Where is God? Does He even care? Is He unable to help or does He just not want to?

I recently watched the movie, “Oh, God” with George Burns on the recommendation from a friend. In the movie God appears to a grocery store manager named Jerry and tells him he is a messenger for the modern world. But Jerry had some important questions to ask “God” before he accepts his mission.

Jerry Landers: How can you permit all the *suffering* that goes on the world?

God: Ah, how can *I* permit the suffering?

Jerry Landers: Yeah!

God: I don’t permit the suffering. You do! Free will. All the choices are yours.

Jerry Landers: Choices? What choices?

God: You can love each other, cherish and nurture each other or you can kill each other. Incidentally, “kill” is the word. It’s not “waste.” If I meant “waste” I would have written “thou shalt not waste.” You’re doing some very funny things with words, here.

Jerry Landers: People are always praying to You. Do You listen?

God: I can’t help hearing. I don’t always listen.

Jerry Landers: So then You don’t care.

God: Of course I care! But what can I do?

Jerry Landers: What can You do? You’re God!

God: Only for the big picture. I don’t get into details.

Jerry Landers: Whatever happens to us…

God: Happens!

No wonder people reject God. If the only idea we have of him is that he is leaving us to our own devices, no wonder we despair. If his only response is to tell us to be nice to each other and hope for the best, yikes! But I have good news. He is present. He does get into the details. He has not left us alone or without comfort. And while yes, I agree that we do exercise our free will by making poor choices (sin), the wonderful news of the gospel is that He loves us and chooses us anyway.

Wake up and smell the iodine!

I was about ten years old and riding my bicycle down the sidewalk when I mismanaged the handlebars and caught my tire in the crack between the pavement and the grass. I tumbled over and scraped my elbow. It was a traumatic thing to happen to me, first because there was so much blood and second because I was about a mile (it may as well have been 1,000 miles) away from home, and there was no adult nearby to help me. I totally panicked. With tears streaming down my face I began to run home but my lungs couldn’t keep up with my pace and I was forced to walk home with blood streaming down my arm. I thought I was going to die. When I finally made it to my house I sobbed to my mother, “Mom, I’m hurt.” She took me into the bathroom, rinsed out my wound and bandaged me up. In that moment I felt so loved and cared for.

The funny thing about that bike was that up until I crashed, I thought I was doing pretty well riding it, which is why I rode so far from home. I was very confident of my ability not to crash and so when it happened I was understandably stunned. I asked the same questions most people do when something bad happens to them. Why did I have to get hurt? But then I also began to blame myself for being so stupid as to screw up navigating the sidewalk. I mean really, who does that? Babies. That’s who. I felt like such a dummy. But when my mom told me that sometimes accidents just happen, it gave me complete freedom from guilt. Then I was free to focus on the important work of her healing my heart (and my elbow) with her love.

Pain jolts us awake to the realization that we cannot heal ourselves. We are not self-sufficient. We are helpless. We need someone to come and bandage us up. That is why our response to pain is so important. Would we not call it foolish to stare at our bleeding elbow, shrug our shoulders and then just move on as if we weren’t bleeding all over the ground?

God is not a sadomasochist. He does not delight in our misery. God does see the deeper wound—the one in our heart we don’t always like to acknowledge—the idea that we don’t need Him at all. More importantly, he wants to heal us. Therefore, I believe He allows pain and suffering in order to shake us out of our prideful inebriation—the idea that we can save ourselves, that we can go on rowing merrily down the stream as if life were just a dream.

We must surrender

I sat in my bedroom staring at the wall. I had been crying in bed for weeks. Nothing comforted me. Not the words of my friends or food or hunger or the questioning eyes of my children. I had no purpose except to shiver and ache and groan. People had listened for a while but they were sick of my misery and had begun to avoid my calls. I wanted to die. I literally could not bear the pain any longer. The doctor had refused my request for more Xanax, the only thing that helped my body be calm. And because I didn’t know what else to do, I began to read my Bible. If I recall correctly, my prayers were not profound. “God help me. I need help. I’m all alone!”

I had been reading the Bible because it was the one thing on earth that truly comforted me. God knew my pain. He knew how it felt to be rejected. And he had words for me that seemed to leap off the page.

As I read those words I felt a mysterious peace settle over my spirit. I felt as if someone had enveloped me in a soul-satisfying hug. My anxiety vanished. My muscles relaxed. So I did the only reasonable thing at that moment; I laid my forehead on my Bible and exhaled. I knew God was present. I knew He had heard my prayer. He is close to the broken hearted. He does save those who are crushed in spirit. His word promised and I knew His words were true.

This was only one of many ways God came close and comforted me during a very dark time in my life. This is not to say I didn’t make foolish choices or try to find comfort in other places. But He just kept loving me where I was, and when those other methods failed, I ran back to His words and I always found the comfort I needed.

God is not a benevolent grandfather-type wagging his finger at us and telling us to go out and be nice to each other because he “doesn’t get into the details”. Rather, he is a patient Father gently calling us to come back and love him again. The whole Bible is the story of his pursuit of us because He loves us. Today if you are suffering terribly, the most important thing you can know is just how deep that love goes. After all, Jesus proved it by leaving the throne room of Heaven to build the bridge from God to us. (Curious how Jesus was never mentioned once in the movie, “O, God”).

Today if you are suffering, whether it is from a painful divorce, migraines, obesity, or a chronic physical ailment, take heart! If we pray, He not only hears us, He listens. And while he may not answer our prayers the way we want Him to, it’s not because he doesn’t get involved in the details. It because He wants to heal the real wound—our prideful, unbelieving hearts. He is more concerned with our eternal state, not this temporary body. Because the truth is, He loves us so much that He was willing to die because He wants our hearts forever.

When I was in high school I was obsessed with horror. Horror movies and horror stories plucked a string deep inside me that throbbed like a wound. I didn’t know at the time how deep the pain went. I only knew that the words on the page and the images on the screen were irresistibly titillating. I consumed them and they became a part of me.

I stopped consuming horror in my early twenties after I began to have nightmares. The dreams were so terrifying that I would lay in bed crying and shaking before I went to sleep. I spent years being afraid of the nighttime–not because I was afraid of the dark, but because I was afraid of the darkness inside of myself. It was the beginning of what I now understand to be the failure of fantasy. What I thought was an escape was actually a dungeon from which I could not escape.

My love of fantasy began with romantic novels. I drank stories like wine–to become intoxicated by the feelings that made me feel. My 13 year old life was rather dull and so I escaped into worlds where I could pretend to be a woman being ravished by a man. I learned love from the pages of books that began with a woman having a problem and ended with a man solving it. I fell in love with “and they lived happily ever after”. Happily ever after became my doctrine.

One of the other fantasies that became deeply ingrained in my psyche was the idea that if I was thin and beautiful, I would be happy. All of the popular television programs espoused this doctrine and every movie proclaimed, “romantic love will save us!” And since all the heroines were thin and pretty, I adopted the pursuit of outward beauty. But when I lost the weight in my early twenties and learned that being thin doesn’t automatically make one happy, I despaired and quickly regained the weight. But rather than face the darkness inside–the darkness I was still unwilling to confront–I buried my head in fantasy once again. If I couldn’t be happy in myself, I would rely on stories and television and music to carry me away. Food was my constant companion in this delusion. As I grew heavier, I grew unhappier. As my clothes grew baggier to cover my frame I sank deeper and deeper into self-loathing until I finally felt so small I couldn’t imagine that anyone loved me at all. I was insignificant. Worthless. Hopeless.

Fantasy led me to believe my life had no value because I wasn’t pretty, rich, or famous. The more I “lived vicariously” in worlds other than reality, the more disillusioned I became.

In essence, fantasy made the wound worse.

I didn’t want to do the hard work required to heal and so I festered and foundered and flailed in my foolishness. The hardest thing I have ever done is too look myself in the eye and say, “Margaret, you have a problem. The second hardest thing was to do something about it.

This realization was actually a tremendous gift. I was so enamored with stories that I’m not sure anyone could have convinced me I had a problem. Since my journey to live a healthy lifestyle forced me to confront the pathos behind my eating disorder, I had to pull my head up out of the sand so-to-speak. I found that facing my 310 pound body was truly horrible. Even worse was walking around the block in it. I despaired when I considered how many steps were required to shed 100 pounds (my initial goal) and in order to get through the pain and suffering, I had to focus on something outside of myself. I chose to focus on Jesus. Each day I was tempted to eat foods that were harmful to my body and I had to make hard choices. I chose Jesus. I began to read The Bible like I had never read it before. It’s message became clear; I had hope. And nothing, not even disordered eating could quash that hope.

One of my favorite genres of story is dystopian fiction and so a few years ago when I picked up an interesting title at the library, I found myself ensconced in the story. The book was “Pure” by Julianna Baggot. The characters were so richly drawn and I could not wait for the second title. “Fuse” did not disappoint. And so when “Burn” came out I read hastily. But as I turned each page, longing for a glimmer or hope, redemption or even just the healing the main characters so desired, I found myself more than disappointed. I was angry. The story ended and my hopes for the characters with it. I credited my frustration with the writer or maybe even my understanding of what story she was trying to tell. But then I picked up another story, “Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children” by Ransom Riggs. Again, I could not put the books down. And at the end of the third story, however, I felt the same disappointment. The stories were well written and imagined but I still wasn’t satisfied with where they landed. I was reminded this morning of my disappointment in The Hunger Games series. Same thing. In fact, I think it was the Hunger Games that finally forced me to acknowledge that the stories themselves, and not the authors, were what was disappointing me. Here is why:

Every day I was living hardship. I was facing depression and sadness and pain. I was choosing to believe that God loved me just as I was, and that He would give me the strength to overcome adversity. The hope I was learning in the gospel, that God saw my suffering and cared, was becoming deeply ingrained in my mind. So much so, one could say it was my new reality. So when I read fiction and didn’t see a redemptive story such as the one I was living in real life, I was sorely disappointed.

One of the greatest casualties of fantasy in our culture is the death of self-worth. We forge our identity via celebrities and when we don’t fit the mold, we start to believe the lie that our lives don’t have as much meaning. Now maybe you are reading this and don’t feel that you have that problem. Let me give a few practical examples of how fantasy contributes to catastrophe in every day life.

I have a friend and co-worker who was blatantly told her career was impaired because she chose not to wear makeup every day to the office. She has been passed over for promotions over and over again. Every so often I see her wearing makeup and I cringe. Why can’t she be judged by the quality of her work rather than the amount of eyeliner she applies?

My mother-in-law finally procured her masters degree but was unable to find work after she was laid off. Her age was a prohibiting factor. Why do we perceive the young as the only viable employees in the workforce? Could it be because the images on our screens don’t celebrate older people as strong contributors? Is that why I have to watch videos at work that teach me to renounce age discrimination?

If you think these examples are not indicative of the power of fantasy in our culture, I would beg to disagree with you. Why else are obese people treated so poorly and as failing at life? Those who live the “before” picture but never realize the “after” live with a painful stigma not unlike Hester Prynne in “The Scarlet Letter”.

But I think the most powerful example of fantasy and its impact on culture is indicative of the divorce rate in America. People have so come to believe that marriage is binding only so long as a couple is fond of each other that we are abandoning our marriages in droves. Why stay faithful once the feelings have fled? Every song on the radio says as much. Hearts are breaking all over town tonight because we bought the Cinderella story hook, line and sinker. “Happily ever after” is a myth and has no basis in reality. So why are we paying Disney to feed it to our children day after day?

A new incarnation of the story, “It” by Stephen King released in theaters recently and I remembered how it once haunted my imagination. I read the story and watched the original television version in the early 1990’s. Never before was a story about fearful fantasies so fully realized. The creature preys on children, feeds on hate, and deceives with images of the victim’s worst fears. Every time I see a trailer or advertisement, I cringe. A new generation is primed and ready for vicarious thrills they receive while evading true victim-hood. But I would like to suggest that they are in reality still victims. They believe the lie that the story will not harm them. They believe they are not dying; that they are safe. They believe, as I once did, that they can walk away from the theater and not be harmed. But the truth is potent; stories implant ideas and ideas have consequences.

Human beings are consumers and if we do not consume the right things, they consume us.

Christ came to set us free from fantasies, but He cannot set us free if we are still clinging to them.

Have you ever felt overwhelmed by the sheer enormity of your need? Did you find that you were so lonely in your struggle that you wept silent tears in a bathroom stall at work because you were afraid of the judgmental eyes of others? Did you look at the happy people around you and struggle to remember the happy days of your youth? Do you feel the void in your heart where hope use to be?

Victor Hugo wrote the beautiful character, Fantine, in his magnum opus, Les Miserable. She was described as “The Blonde, because of her beautiful sunny hair” and her story begins when she is young and full of hope for the future. She is in love with Felix Tholomyes and in the company of beautiful friends. They go about celebrating, feasting and drinking, but at the end of the day they are abandoned by the men, and Fantine is left to care for her illegitimate child. She lives and breathes only for her daughter, and in a cruel twist of fate loses her job and is forced to become a prostitute to care for her beloved Cosette.

In the popular musical she sings, “I had a dream my life would be so different from this hell I’m living. So different now from what it seemed. Now life has killed the dream I dreamed.” Have you ever felt like that?

How do we manage to keep hope alive when our body is failing? I have a friend who has endured more physical suffering than anyone I know and without complaint. Terri has fought breast cancer twice. She endured Sarcoidosis. Then she met bone marrow cancer and received a successful bone marrow transplant only to develop host vs. graft disease. This plague has attacked her lungs and her bones, which are literally disintegrating. She is now confined to a wheel chair and her days are spent in a small home in isolation. Sometimes we are so reduced by our puddle of pain that nothing will bring us comfort.

So it was with Job, my favorite character in the Bible. Now maybe you are reading this and thinking, “Oh, great. Margaret is talking about religion again.” And maybe you think religion is nonsense for stupid people and no more than fairy tales for the uneducated. If we were sitting in a café over a cup of coffee I would counter that with, don’t we all need a hero? And if we don’t, why are there so many heroes in modern media? (Superman, X-Men, Agents of Shield, Spock, etc.) They are so popular that people dress up like them and pretend to be them. So give me this, even if Job wasn’t real and never lived (which I believe he did), I still think there is something we can learn from him as revealed in his character via his story in the Bible.

The story goes that Satan challenged God to strike Job (a rich and prosperous man) with afflictions with the understanding that, “if you stretch out your hand and touch all that he has, he will curse you to your face.” I get the feeling that this is a familiar strategy of Satan’s. He expects people to curse God when bad things happen to them. And in an interesting twist, God took Satan up on the challenge. In one day, all of Job’s children died in a tragic accident, storms came and destroyed his livelihood, and finally he was stricken with physical sores from the top of his head to the bottom of his feet. It would be easy to read all of this with little more than passing interest were it not for the recent afflictions my country of origin is currently faced with (Hurricanes, fires, floods and the obesity epidemic—you know I had to squeeze that one in there!).

Predictably, Job’s wife said, “Do you still hold fast to your integrity? Curse God and die.” (and before you are too hard on her, please remember they were her children too). But Job said, “Shall we receive good from God, and shall we not receive evil?” I can’t imagine there was anyone on earth more deserving of reasons to curse God, but Job did not. Why?

I don’t know about my dear reader, but I have cursed God for much lesser things. Bad brakes, for instance. On my car. (You can’t see me but I’m shaking my head in shame). When I read about Job my heart lurches in my chest. Could I maintain my faith in a God I cannot see if I lost everything of value, like Job did? The honest answer is, I don’t know.

Also, I don’t know how as human beings we come to react so dispassionately to people in pain. Could it be that suffering people make us uncomfortable? Could it be that our inability to relieve their pain makes us feel helpless and so we begin to avoid them because their suffering exposes our own insecurities? Is that why suffering people end up isolated? Because we are too selfish to enter into their suffering with them? But I digress.

Job’s friends did the next reasonable thing they could think of and attacked his character. They basically said he had brought all of this suffering on himself because of his mistakes. I personally can’t think of a more hurtful thing to say to my friend Terri than, “You sure are having a rough go of things. I bet the physical suffering you are dealing with is all your fault.” No wonder Job responded with, “Such miserable comforters are you all!”

But I find immense value in Job’s responses and observations. He says of God, “Who will say to him, ‘What are you doing?'” and “For He (God) is not a man, as I am, that I might answer him.” Job pleads for relief and he wants to know why these terrible things happened to him. Isn’t that the question all of us ask when we encounter physical, emotional and basically any kind of stress or pain? “God, why me?”

Whenever the sorrows and suffering in my life overwhelm me, I turn to the book of Job because interestingly, God actually answers back. And his answer (in the form of a series of questions), comforts me. (You can read starting in Job 38 if you’d like the full response). But I think the gist of what He says is, “It’s not all about you, Job. There are bigger things at play here.” And then he goes on to describe His character as revealed through nature. “Who provides for the raven its prey, when its young ones cry to God for help, and wander about for lack of food?” To me this passage is echoed in the words of Jesus in the gospel of Matthew. “Look at the birds of the air: they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they?” (Matthew 6:26)

I think God’s response to Job is basically this, “I see your pain. Nothing gets by me. Now, Job, you say it’s all my fault, but do you –a mere man—really have the whole picture?” (Job 40:2)

Terri could ask God the very real question, “God, does my pain have a purpose?”

I believe it does.

Terri acknowledged the suffering that comes with spending weeks and months in a hospital bed, but instead of wallowing in her suffering, as I am prone to do, she turned her understanding into action. She formed her own little ministry called, “Pouches for Patients.” The ministry provides long term patients on a remote telemetry a way to get out of a hospital gown and into their “normal clothes”. She hand knits pouches that can be worn around the neck and then donates them to the Siteman Cancer Center. The problem is they have become so popular, Terri was not able to make enough to meet demand. So she asks her friends to help sew, crochet and knit more. Where does that kind of love come from? Terri is on oxygen and can barely move due to crushing pain, but she slowly and carefully seeks to find a way to provide relief to others. Why? She wants to give comfort to people with the comfort she has received.

Fantine died in abject misery. Jean Valjean was so moved by compassion for her that he sought out and adopted her child and raised her as his own. If you know the story, he too was helped by the hand of love and grace. We often speak of love as if it is a trifle of a gift to give, but it is the most powerful gift in the world.

We often speak of Jesus as a good man who lived on the earth many years ago. But if we read the gospel stories about him we learn that he claimed to be God. As he was being arrested, one of his friends tried to protect him and cut off the ear of one of the soldiers who sought to seize him. Jesus admonished him, “Do you think that I cannot appeal to my Father, and he will at once send me more than twelve legions of angels?” And then he healed the guard by putting his ear back on. Can you imagine the conversations that guy had with his friends and family the next day? Jesus was called a man of sorrows and one acquainted with grief. But he didn’t have to be. He could have stayed in heaven and left human beings to their own devices.

But he did not.

Why?

How come we never ask that question?

I believe the answer is because he loves us. At least that’s what all the bumper stickers say.

We are not alone. We are not without hope. But we have something more profound than the mere fleeting happiness of youth. We have something more wonderful than a catchy tune that tells us to “clap along when we feel like a room without a roof.” We have something…no rather, some One, who saw the whole picture and came to sit with us in our pain. He didn’t tell us it was our fault (though it was) but rather took all the bad things we ever did and nailed them to a tree called Calvary and there killed death forever.

Is your husband or brother fighting cancer? Has your son cut off all contact and promised to never speak to you again? Is your body wracked with pain unmentionable? Is your child disabled in such a way that you have retreated to your home and are barely able to leave? Or did your child die? Are you Fantine? Has life killed the dream you dreamed? There is hope. All you have to do is reach out and take His hand.