October 29, 2003
More Musings
a friend writes...
But alas, it's been 11 years and I'm still here, in pain, 24-7.
He's sustained me when I don't have the strength my self.
Pain sucks like nothing else.
I feel for you Josie.
I'm sorry.
I can't really explain how significant his own identification with suffering has been to me. When I read these few lines, I teared up, right here in the middle of the library at SFU.
It got me to thinking about joy and suffering. I've had a joy about me seemingly since birth. There have been ups and downs but I've been able to find something good about it and endure joyfully.
How authentic is my witness if I am like Satan thought Job was, a disciple who only blessed God because things were good, or because his health was intact? What witness does the last 23 years have if I am not able to continue in it now?
I'm not seriously worried about this, but interested. I'd rather people see my real self at this moment in time than put on Joy for old time's sake. I just wish that my real self at this moment in time had some joy to put on. Whatever I have is given of God - because all I feel like doing right now is joining Job in his pile of ashes. More on this later.
a friend writes...
But alas, it's been 11 years and I'm still here, in pain, 24-7.
He's sustained me when I don't have the strength my self.
Pain sucks like nothing else.
I feel for you Josie.
I'm sorry.
I can't really explain how significant his own identification with suffering has been to me. When I read these few lines, I teared up, right here in the middle of the library at SFU.
It got me to thinking about joy and suffering. I've had a joy about me seemingly since birth. There have been ups and downs but I've been able to find something good about it and endure joyfully.
How authentic is my witness if I am like Satan thought Job was, a disciple who only blessed God because things were good, or because his health was intact? What witness does the last 23 years have if I am not able to continue in it now?
I'm not seriously worried about this, but interested. I'd rather people see my real self at this moment in time than put on Joy for old time's sake. I just wish that my real self at this moment in time had some joy to put on. Whatever I have is given of God - because all I feel like doing right now is joining Job in his pile of ashes. More on this later.
October 28, 2003
Sorry...
I am so tempted to say sorry every time I bring up what is going on in my life now that pain has become a part of it. I am so conscious of society's desire to not be reminded of hard, painful things, but at the moment, that's just where I'm at. So there.
From a recent letter to a friend, who happened to ask the right questions at the right time to get me to do some much needed thinking out loud:
Thankfully, though I'm totally devastated emotionally
by this news, I'm also realizing that I may be made of
tougher stuff than I thought. I have absolutely no
idea how I will simply get through each day of my
future without going bananas from pain. There have
been days where I was sure that the pain was so strong
that my body would dry up and blow away somehow... but
I'm still here. And here I am, two weeks later almost,
and though I still have three packages of kleenex in
my purse (I bought the ones printed with cool stuff -
one package has the mona lisa printed on the tissues
themselves!), I am at school, not crying, looking
forward to Christmas when I get to visit my friend
Kelly in Pennsylvania, etc. etc. Seth said to me this
morning that I looked more myself, and I replied that
sometimes I'm just able to get up, pull my socks up
and forget that there's any horrible diagnosis looming
over my head... it's when I stop, or spend any time
alone that I remember and I feel like I've fallen into
a deep hole. Saturday night was like that, a deep,
pervasive, sucking unhappiness. I came home, and went
to bed. It was a good solution, I felt better in the
morning. Sometimes it smacks of avoidance, and
sometimes it's just a good coping mechanism to allow
me to get through difficult times.
...
I don't want to fade away either. I have a definite
feeling of "rage, rage against the dying of the light"
in me. My friend Fariyal maintains that "you are not
going to go down this way. I don't believe that this
is what God created our bodies to be, and I don't
believe that this is what you are here for to begin
with." I love her for being mad for me, mad enough to
decide not to believe it, when it's the only thing
that I can see sometimes. Sometimes I just want to
crawl into my dark hole and die, and sometimes I never
want to see another dark hole again. It's a crazy, up
and down kind of life for me. I can't imagine how it
will ever be any different, but at the same time, I
know it has to be - because when I have the emotional
energy to (like today), I refuse to believe that this
part of my life is permanent.
I know that there will be days when my e-mails and my
conversations with people will be sad, depressing and
vacuous. Those are the days when I can't forget
earthly wisdom - that I feel doomed to the future the
doctors have identified so carelessly for me. And then
there are those lovely few days when my e-mails will
be like this one, pondering, thoughtful, daring to be
have hope even when it hurts to. These are precious
days when I choose to fight - against my future, my
sickness, and my own discouragement. I remain under a
deep blanket of sadness and discouragement - but there
are these days when, through the warp and weave, I can
see the sun. It doesn't yet feel warm, but it is
bright.
I am so tempted to say sorry every time I bring up what is going on in my life now that pain has become a part of it. I am so conscious of society's desire to not be reminded of hard, painful things, but at the moment, that's just where I'm at. So there.
From a recent letter to a friend, who happened to ask the right questions at the right time to get me to do some much needed thinking out loud:
Thankfully, though I'm totally devastated emotionally
by this news, I'm also realizing that I may be made of
tougher stuff than I thought. I have absolutely no
idea how I will simply get through each day of my
future without going bananas from pain. There have
been days where I was sure that the pain was so strong
that my body would dry up and blow away somehow... but
I'm still here. And here I am, two weeks later almost,
and though I still have three packages of kleenex in
my purse (I bought the ones printed with cool stuff -
one package has the mona lisa printed on the tissues
themselves!), I am at school, not crying, looking
forward to Christmas when I get to visit my friend
Kelly in Pennsylvania, etc. etc. Seth said to me this
morning that I looked more myself, and I replied that
sometimes I'm just able to get up, pull my socks up
and forget that there's any horrible diagnosis looming
over my head... it's when I stop, or spend any time
alone that I remember and I feel like I've fallen into
a deep hole. Saturday night was like that, a deep,
pervasive, sucking unhappiness. I came home, and went
to bed. It was a good solution, I felt better in the
morning. Sometimes it smacks of avoidance, and
sometimes it's just a good coping mechanism to allow
me to get through difficult times.
...
I don't want to fade away either. I have a definite
feeling of "rage, rage against the dying of the light"
in me. My friend Fariyal maintains that "you are not
going to go down this way. I don't believe that this
is what God created our bodies to be, and I don't
believe that this is what you are here for to begin
with." I love her for being mad for me, mad enough to
decide not to believe it, when it's the only thing
that I can see sometimes. Sometimes I just want to
crawl into my dark hole and die, and sometimes I never
want to see another dark hole again. It's a crazy, up
and down kind of life for me. I can't imagine how it
will ever be any different, but at the same time, I
know it has to be - because when I have the emotional
energy to (like today), I refuse to believe that this
part of my life is permanent.
I know that there will be days when my e-mails and my
conversations with people will be sad, depressing and
vacuous. Those are the days when I can't forget
earthly wisdom - that I feel doomed to the future the
doctors have identified so carelessly for me. And then
there are those lovely few days when my e-mails will
be like this one, pondering, thoughtful, daring to be
have hope even when it hurts to. These are precious
days when I choose to fight - against my future, my
sickness, and my own discouragement. I remain under a
deep blanket of sadness and discouragement - but there
are these days when, through the warp and weave, I can
see the sun. It doesn't yet feel warm, but it is
bright.
October 27, 2003
The latest from the pain front
I don't know how many or who reads this blog, so for some of you these regular posts referring to my struggle with pain may be confusing. The crash-course update goes like this: I was born with a disability similar to Spina Bifida. I am now 24 and use a wheelchair full-time, am active, athletic and generally happy. Five months ago, I began to experience a strange and brutal pain from which there seemed to be no escape. By July I was completely unable to finish my courses at SFU; by the end of September, the pain was bad enough to give me nightmares and significant anxiety about sleeping, being alone, or having another 'episode' where the pain would be at an 11 on a scale of 1 to 10. ten days ago I was diagnosed with Arachnoiditis, for which there is no treatment or escape. Here is where we pick up the story:
Tomorrow the bible study I co-lead at SFU will be looking at Hebrews 4 and Isaiah 53 and talking about Christ identifying with our sufferings, and His desire for our wholeness - read: physical healing. This is tremendously intimidating for me as it was only last week that the girls in my study gathered around me to pray for my own physical healing. This season in my life has unquestionably been the most difficult ever and I constantly wonder if I will ever make it through. But I have definitely been stretched spiritually, particularly in the area of how God feels about healing. I never wanted it before now - because I never felt that I needed it. Being born with a disability means that I have never really known any other kind of life, and I was quite happy to go about living an abundant life on wheels instead of on foot. That was before pain wracked my nights and days and has limited me in my relationships, academics and future. I am not being dramatic here; go to google and look up "neuropathic pain" and read some of the descriptions there to give you an idea of what life is like.
However, as much as my life has been limited, it has as much been expanded into places and planes I had not previously experienced. I mentioned being stretched, particularly in my theology of healing. I had never let anyone pray for me for healing before, and I think had hands layed on me for prayer at least once a week for the last five months. I've also grown in my appreciation of the truly important things. It reminds me of Corrie ten Boom's time in concentration camps, when the smallest blessings seemed the biggest and any communication from God was a holy event. I am at a point in my life where I live hanging on to the last thing God told me because the medical community has no answers or solutions, and secular culture tosses the unhealable aside like lepers. To be succinct, I need God now, more so than I ever have, and though this place is a miserable, painful place to be, it is also a place of tremendous growth.
There's a plant called a fireweed which grows only in places which have been recently ravaged by forest fires. It is a beautiful, colourful plant which attracts pollinators and is a catalyst for regeneration of the ecosystem. To me it's an awesome illustration of God's own system of redeeming the horrible into the beautiful. I may sound heretical when I say that I am not completely sure whether any of this is worth the growth that has come of it - I am in a stage of acute hopelessness. But illustrations like this give me an idea that it is possible that redemption could come of this situation, and that grace that's bigger than I can imagine might be waiting around the corner.
I don't know how many or who reads this blog, so for some of you these regular posts referring to my struggle with pain may be confusing. The crash-course update goes like this: I was born with a disability similar to Spina Bifida. I am now 24 and use a wheelchair full-time, am active, athletic and generally happy. Five months ago, I began to experience a strange and brutal pain from which there seemed to be no escape. By July I was completely unable to finish my courses at SFU; by the end of September, the pain was bad enough to give me nightmares and significant anxiety about sleeping, being alone, or having another 'episode' where the pain would be at an 11 on a scale of 1 to 10. ten days ago I was diagnosed with Arachnoiditis, for which there is no treatment or escape. Here is where we pick up the story:
Tomorrow the bible study I co-lead at SFU will be looking at Hebrews 4 and Isaiah 53 and talking about Christ identifying with our sufferings, and His desire for our wholeness - read: physical healing. This is tremendously intimidating for me as it was only last week that the girls in my study gathered around me to pray for my own physical healing. This season in my life has unquestionably been the most difficult ever and I constantly wonder if I will ever make it through. But I have definitely been stretched spiritually, particularly in the area of how God feels about healing. I never wanted it before now - because I never felt that I needed it. Being born with a disability means that I have never really known any other kind of life, and I was quite happy to go about living an abundant life on wheels instead of on foot. That was before pain wracked my nights and days and has limited me in my relationships, academics and future. I am not being dramatic here; go to google and look up "neuropathic pain" and read some of the descriptions there to give you an idea of what life is like.
However, as much as my life has been limited, it has as much been expanded into places and planes I had not previously experienced. I mentioned being stretched, particularly in my theology of healing. I had never let anyone pray for me for healing before, and I think had hands layed on me for prayer at least once a week for the last five months. I've also grown in my appreciation of the truly important things. It reminds me of Corrie ten Boom's time in concentration camps, when the smallest blessings seemed the biggest and any communication from God was a holy event. I am at a point in my life where I live hanging on to the last thing God told me because the medical community has no answers or solutions, and secular culture tosses the unhealable aside like lepers. To be succinct, I need God now, more so than I ever have, and though this place is a miserable, painful place to be, it is also a place of tremendous growth.
There's a plant called a fireweed which grows only in places which have been recently ravaged by forest fires. It is a beautiful, colourful plant which attracts pollinators and is a catalyst for regeneration of the ecosystem. To me it's an awesome illustration of God's own system of redeeming the horrible into the beautiful. I may sound heretical when I say that I am not completely sure whether any of this is worth the growth that has come of it - I am in a stage of acute hopelessness. But illustrations like this give me an idea that it is possible that redemption could come of this situation, and that grace that's bigger than I can imagine might be waiting around the corner.
blogroll
...step right up and view for yourself three recent additions to the sleepless blogroll to your left:
julio: a friend from church, also known as 'boogie.' He sings, he dances, he plays the piano - and directs the Christmas Desert Theatre Choir! Also known as 'terpsichorean,' his is a blog you don't want to miss!
adam: yet another post-mod blog, this one by an astute beginner youth pastor somewhere in the middle of idaho.
alex (this one not a girl): how can you pass up a visit to a blog which describes it's author as: "philosophy student and amateur theologian, designer, musician and ladies' man. "
...step right up and view for yourself three recent additions to the sleepless blogroll to your left:
julio: a friend from church, also known as 'boogie.' He sings, he dances, he plays the piano - and directs the Christmas Desert Theatre Choir! Also known as 'terpsichorean,' his is a blog you don't want to miss!
adam: yet another post-mod blog, this one by an astute beginner youth pastor somewhere in the middle of idaho.
alex (this one not a girl): how can you pass up a visit to a blog which describes it's author as: "philosophy student and amateur theologian, designer, musician and ladies' man. "
Church of What's Happening Now
I had an interesting conversation with my dad the other day. We were driving past His Place, a church in Burlington, Washington, which has a building which looks like Noah's Ark. My dad mentioned that it's "definitely a 'church of what's happening now'" and I asked what he meant by that (me being 24 and him being 60, I missed out on a lot of things he's seen!). According to my dad, it means a church that promotes or performs whatever is most likely to "get them in the doors" on a Sunday morning, in other words, gimmicky, pop-culture religion.
This brought me back to thinking about the place of the pursuit of cultural relevance in the post-modern church. A book title I saw in the Christian Bookstore (that bastion of post-modern irrelevance), Prophetic Untimeliness: challenging the idol of relevance, got me thinking of a huge danger of post-modern Christians - worshiping the idol of relevance. Now, I haven't read the book, so I might have totally misinterpreted the title, but I can truly see how we may totally sacrifice our heavenly citizenship in favour of relevance on a grand, post-modern scale. It's like so many things in our Christian life: it's all about the balance. On one hand, we cannot afford to, as a church, remain mired in tradition and religion when relational Christianity is so evidently needed to an orphaned generation. On the other hand, we run the risk of being so 'relevant,' we muddy up the message. It reminds me of how, in high school, I tried to be everything to everyone in order that I become more popular. In the end, my ultimate goal was not met, and I was more unhappy than ever. Not only was I still unpopular, but I also had little self-identity left.
How can we as post-mod Christians avoid leaving this lack of Christian self-identity to our children's generation?
I had an interesting conversation with my dad the other day. We were driving past His Place, a church in Burlington, Washington, which has a building which looks like Noah's Ark. My dad mentioned that it's "definitely a 'church of what's happening now'" and I asked what he meant by that (me being 24 and him being 60, I missed out on a lot of things he's seen!). According to my dad, it means a church that promotes or performs whatever is most likely to "get them in the doors" on a Sunday morning, in other words, gimmicky, pop-culture religion.
This brought me back to thinking about the place of the pursuit of cultural relevance in the post-modern church. A book title I saw in the Christian Bookstore (that bastion of post-modern irrelevance), Prophetic Untimeliness: challenging the idol of relevance, got me thinking of a huge danger of post-modern Christians - worshiping the idol of relevance. Now, I haven't read the book, so I might have totally misinterpreted the title, but I can truly see how we may totally sacrifice our heavenly citizenship in favour of relevance on a grand, post-modern scale. It's like so many things in our Christian life: it's all about the balance. On one hand, we cannot afford to, as a church, remain mired in tradition and religion when relational Christianity is so evidently needed to an orphaned generation. On the other hand, we run the risk of being so 'relevant,' we muddy up the message. It reminds me of how, in high school, I tried to be everything to everyone in order that I become more popular. In the end, my ultimate goal was not met, and I was more unhappy than ever. Not only was I still unpopular, but I also had little self-identity left.
How can we as post-mod Christians avoid leaving this lack of Christian self-identity to our children's generation?
