The Loll of Recovery

 



Three weeks into my recovery from surgery, I've come to find the challenge of being patient during this mini-season of limits.  I've had a lot of time to stare up at the ceiling and see the last six months of my life play out in my mind, like an old movie that is not so familiar anymore.  The last three months even more so. 

It leaves me wondering how marathon runners feel throughout their journey, how they feel in the middle of the race, and even more important, how they take it all in after it's all over, once the finish line celebration is over, and the excitement of it all fades away, waiting to be filed into some pocket in their memory.  What do they think when they look back and see the journey of months training, enduring the demands of the race, and even the race itself?  What do they make of it all?

I've never actually ran a marathon, nor any type of other race for that matter, but I would imagine during their recovery the immediate response to something like that would be to determine whether the experience was a good one or a bad one.  Maybe they even attempt to define it mid-race, and that determination either keeps them going or slows them down.  Or maybe the way to endure through to the 26th mile is to keep themselves from doing just that; to fight the need to define their experience and simply put one foot in front of the other and keep going; to keep their mind set on the goal--to finish the race well, simply because they made a conscious choice to run it, because quitting isn't an option.

In a lot of ways, the last three months of my journey has been much the same battle of endurance.  I've endured hit after hit in the physical toll of chemo and surgery and all that lay between, taking it one day at time, fighting against whatever came each day with God's help with a strength not of my own.  Now...in the loll of recovery, there is not as much to fight against.  I've found myself unable to do much more than sit and find a way to rest my body and wait.  Each time I sit and stare up at the ceiling everything comes to a head, and the temptation to define my experience as either good or bad is very real.  And though I know better, I can't help but feel the weight of change on my life; and though I know my present circumstances don't define who I am or the future God has promised me, I can't help but feel a deep heaviness lingering inside.  Every area of my life has been impacted over the past three months:  Work, ministry, socially, spiritually, financially, mentally, and many times over physically.  Nothing is as it was, and it continues to change.

And as I sit here and wait for my body to recover from the many, many....many changes of the last three months, I'm overwhelmed with a sense of grief.  To grieve change, the good, the not so good, the downright ugly, and to grieve what was lost along the way.  To grieve not out of a sense of defeat, but to grieve out of a sense of humanity.  Sometimes the reality of the difficult times in our lives is heavier than we know how to carry, and the grief is real, the grief reminds us though we are strong, we are not without weakness.  I've come to understand the more I fight against the sense of grief, and the more I try to distract myself from it, the heavier it becomes, the harder it is to rest, to be at peace in the present, to be still in not understanding exactly what God is up to.

I think of the greats of the Bible, and I think of those who seemed to be taken by the sense of their own humanity, those who needed to stop and grieve.  I think of Elijah, a man who was able to call down fire from heaven, call a famine into being, fed by ravens and a widow, raised the dead, and yet he found himself grieving the journey that was too much for him, hiding in a cave at a mountaintop.  And it was there he heard the voice of God (1 Kings 17-19).  I think of Job, a man the Bible says was blameless and upright, who feared God and turned away from evil, and he lost everything, literally everything, and his sense of grief was overwhelmingly real.  And in his grieving, he presented himself to God as broken man, and God not only restored Job with great abundance, but He revealed Himself to Job in a magnificent way (Job).  I think of David, a man who fought with wild animals, giants, armies, and won, a man called to greatness, a man the Bible says was "a man after God's own heart," and you'll find in his many psalms he grieved deeply, and often over the many trials in his life (1 Samuel 16 - 2 Samuel).  In fact, some of the psalms he wrote in his time of grief were prophetic, and some were used to inspire the apostles of the early church in their time of grief.

And then I think of Jesus.  The Son of God.  He became human to save us all from our own corrupt nature.  He grieved out of a sense of humanity in Gethsemane, where He sweated blood, where He said, "My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death." (Matthew 26:38)  He knew the depths of our sorrows, He knew how capable we are of weakness, how heavy pain and loss can be, and He knew how far the limits of humanity can weigh on us.  And I believe because He allowed Himself a time of grief, He was able to realize just how much we needed Him, just how vulnerable we really are in our time of need.  And I believe out of the love for the Father, and out of love for us, He got up, and He did it.  And He changed everything.  And in doing so, He gave us the victory, so that at the end of times of grieving we can rise up and know that no matter what has happened, or what is to come, victory is always ahead for us.  We have only to wait and be still and hope in the Lord.

As Hebrews 4:14-16 says, "We need to hold on to our declaration of faith: We have a superior chief priest who has gone through the heavens.  That person is Jesus, the Son of God.  We have a chief priest who is able to sympathize with our weaknesses.  He was tempted in every way that we are, but he didn't sin.  So we can go confidently to the throne of God's grace to receive mercy and find kindness, which will help us at the right time."  I've come to understand that grieving is essential to the journey.  It's how we allow ourselves to grow, and allow God to teach us along the way what we are unable to understand on our own, and to endure through hardship--be it pain, or loss, or hurt, or unwanted change.  Time and time again, He meets us there...when we get alone with Him and let Him in...when we're honest with ourselves to acknowledge our limits.

When Paul presented God with his weakness, God responded, "My grace is enough; it's all you need.  My strength comes into its own in your weakness." (2 Corinthians 12:9)  Paul came to understand that weakness, loss, pain, and even suffering isn't what defines us in times of grieving, but what God is able to do in those times, and how we're not left without hope.  We can have an authentic calm, an undeniable joy, and a strength not of ourselves rise up on the inside of us when we get alone with God, when He meets us there to help us endure through it.  As Paul puts it in 2 Corinthians 12:9-10, "Once I heard that, I was glad to let it happen. I quit focusing on the handicap and began appreciating the gift. It was a case of Christ’s strength moving in on my weakness. Now I take limitations in stride, and with good cheer, these limitations that cut me down to size—abuse, accidents, opposition, bad breaks. I just let Christ take over! And so the weaker I get, the stronger I become."

And once we rise up from our grief, we rise up as overcomers, more than conquerors in Christ, and all because Jesus didn't succumb to His own grief, but He made a decision motivated by love to continue and finish what He came to accomplish, and trust the Father to continue to work it all for the good like it promises in Romans 8:28.  Good is ALWAYS ahead, though your present circumstances may not seem or feel "good," you need only to wait and press forward to see what God will make of it.  And though I don't know what it feels like to finish a marathon, or what they look back on the experience and see, I know the true victory begins when you make the choice to rise up, put one foot in front of the other and continue toward the Good in store ahead.

"It’s not that I’ve already reached the goal or have already completed the course. But I run to win that which Jesus Christ has already won for me.  Brothers and sisters, I can’t consider myself a winner yet. This is what I do: I don’t look back, I lengthen my stride, and I run straight toward the goal to win the prize that God’s heavenly call offers in Christ Jesus." Philippians 3:12-14