Acquainted with Sorrow

All heavy-laden, 

acquainted with sorrow, 

may Christ in our marrow

carry us home.

            

– Jars of Clay, “This Road”

Variable, and therefore miserable condition of man! this minute I was well, and am ill, this minute. I am surprised with a sudden change, and alteration to worse, and can impute it to no cause, nor call it by any name. We study health, and we deliberate upon our meats, and drink, and air, and exercises, and we hew and we polish every stone that goes to that building; and so our health is a long and a regular work: but in a minute a cannon batters all, overthrows all, demolishes all; a sickness unprevented for all our diligence, unsuspected for all our curiosity; nay, undeserved, if we consider only disorder, summons us, seizes us, possesses us, destroys us in an instant.

                        – John Donne, Devotions upon Emergent Occasions

There’s a lot of pain in the world.

There are others whose experiences are far worse than mine, but I’m going to tell you my own story.

My medical history is a mess.  To begin with, I was born with a heart condition called Tetralogy of Fallot.  It’s a combination of four heart defects. Before surgeries were developed to repair it, patients were lucky to reach seven or eight years old.  Four open-heart surgeries later, I’m thirty-three now and thankful.

I’ve thought about my death since I was a child.  I remember begging God that I wouldn’t die.  I don’t know if I was overreacting, but it doesn’t make much difference when you’re twelve.  As a toddler between my first and second open-heart surgeries, my parents took me as many places as they could so I could experience as much as possible, in case I didn’t make it.  I grew up with constant reminders of my own frailty every recess, gym class, and afternoon outside.  I never got the chance to experience or even expect a life of normalcy, far from the shadow of suffering

Even now I wonder, how long do I have to live?  I’ve always assumed less time than other people.  I don’t know if that’s actually true or not, but my expectations have always been relatively modest.  Is it just a matter of time until things give out?

My heart has been repaired, but I’ll never really be out of the woods.  Artificial heart valves wear out every 10-20 years, requiring another surgical replacement, and I’m especially susceptible to endocarditis, a serious bacterial infection of the heart.  I had that a few years ago.  It ran me into the ground.

You know it’s a bad sign when the hospital gets your blood work and calls you at 6:30 am to tell you to get to the emergency room.  I found myself in a hospital bed with a blood pressure of about 70/40 (that’s really dangerous), lying flat on my back to keep it from getting worse.

I almost died.  Not like on TV, with all the high drama and everything, but if I hadn’t answered my phone and just stayed in bed, I might not be typing this right now.

2015 was terrible.  I cried in the shower.  Five hospital admissions, one ambulance ride, pneumonia, endocarditis, six weeks of IV antibiotics, two surgical procedures including an open-heart valve replacement, and I didn’t feel like I had anything left.

But just wait, add to all that chronic depression, years of misery without end.

Depression is terrible. The magnitude of misery bears little to no relation to one’s actual circumstances.  On the outside, you can have the perfect life with every advantage and blessing imaginable, but inside every day is hellish, as if someone were constantly ripping out your insides and trampling all over them.  Every outer setback is salt in the wound, and no joy seems able to lift the spirit.  

Bind it up with a years-long internal struggle between faith and doubt and the deconstruction of practically everything I was taught to believe, and the word “misery” is not visceral enough. 

And yet, there’s more.

Not too long ago, my son was born with the same heart condition that I was, only more complicated.  It shouldn’t have happened, this condition isn’t supposed to be hereditary.  Despite genetic testing, the doctors don’t know why it happened.  He’s happy and healthy, but he’ll never really live a normal life.  They think that if we have another child, the likelihood of them having Tetralogy of Fallot might well be 50%.  I just pray the mental illness that runs in my family hasn’t gotten passed to him too.  

And now my wife’s mother is dying of fast-moving Parkinson’s Disease.

How could God allow such things?  What could I have done, what could any of us have done, to deserve these things?  Sometimes bad things just happen, seemingly without rhyme or reason.  Is the best of all possible worlds one in which natural processes run amok, doling out harm indiscriminately?

If you take the Garden of Eden and the Fall of Adam and Eve literally, you can perhaps blame it all on them and more or less leave it at that, but for those of us for whom that narrative has been complicated by science, history, biblical criticism, and a deeper look at Scripture in its cultural context, those easy answers long ago stopped being satisfactory if they ever were in the first place.

Where is God in all this? 

I wish I knew.

Years ago, Andrew Peterson wrote a song called “The Silence of God”:

It's enough to drive a man crazy; it'll break a man's faith
It's enough to make him wonder if he's ever been sane
When he's bleating for comfort from Thy staff and Thy rod
And the heavens’ only answer is the silence of God

It'll shake a man's timbers when he loses his heart
When he has to remember what broke him apart
This yoke may be easy, but this burden is not
When the crying fields are frozen by the silence of God

And if a man has got to listen to the voices of the mob
Who are reeling in the throes of all the happiness they've got
When they tell you all their troubles have been nailed up to that cross
Then what about the times when even followers get lost?
'Cause we all get lost sometimes

There's a statue of Jesus on a monastery knoll
In the hills of Kentucky, all quiet and cold
And He's kneeling in the garden, as silent as a stone
All His friends are sleeping and He's weeping all alone

And the man of all sorrows, he never forgot
What sorrow is carried by the hearts that he bought
So when the questions dissolve into the silence of God
The aching may remain, but the breaking does not
The aching may remain, but the breaking does not
In the holy, lonesome echo of the silence of God

Sometimes the silence is all we get.

The suffering can seem overwhelming, but there can be goodness too.

Does love overcome pain? (And I mean here and now, in this life, not just what comes after.)  Maybe it does. It certainly breaks through our darkness in a multitude of expected and unexpected ways.

The world is full of pain, but even in the midst of suffering, we as a species by and large seem to feel that life is still worth living.  Not always, but far more often than not.  And maybe that says something in spite of it all.

By now you may be wondering where the theodicy is in this post?  When am I going to explain that this will be okay in the end, that a suffering Savior shares in your pain and conquered it, along with sin and death on the cross? I believe those things, and I will write about them sometime, but to jump in with all of it right away cuts short our opportunity to reflect on what we and others truly feel.  Healing requires acknowledging our pain.  Have no doubt that there is healing, that it can and does get better, but allow yourself to accept the reality of your own sorrow.

“The aching may remain, but the breaking does not

In the holy, lonesome echo of the silence of God.”