Life and My Wife Teach Me. Again.

August 20, 2009

During the week following surgery I had done little more than sleep on the couch, sleep on the recliner,  sleep on the bed and gulp down pain medication (hence all the aforementioned napping), so when D left one morning to run errands I thought enough was enough; it was about time I get up and get a few things done to help out around the house.

As soon as D left, I got to work. Hobbling around the kitchen, I emptied the dishwasher, put the dishes away and wiped down the counter tops. I limped into the living room and folded up the blankets that covered the couch where I’d spent the first couple days sleeping when the stairs to our bedroom had seemed no less insurmountable than scaling Mt. Everest. I crawled into the laundry room, emptied the clothes dryer, folded the clothes, and carried them upstairs where I attempted to strip and remake our bed.

I heard D enter through the garage door 30 minutes later. I heard her give out a long resigned sigh in the kitchen. I heard her pass through the living room and as she began climbing the stairs to our room I heard her say, “Anita, what have you done?”

Upon entering our bedroom she was greeted by a pile of crumbled sheets in one corner of the floor, a pyramid of stripped pillows in another, a stack of folded laundry teetering precariously on one corner of our dresser, a heap of blankets scattered and dripping off one side of the bed, and her wife sprawled like a rag doll beside them.

“You’ve been doing everything. I just wanted to help out around the house,” I said meekly and weakly.

She didn’t say anything.

I went on. “Did you look in the kitchen? I emptied the dishwasher and I cleaned up my mess in the living room and I folded the clothes that were in the dryer and look! I stripped the bed and at least got the bottom sheet on.”

Now this was the moment when my beloved was suppose to be touched by my efforts and respond by saying something really warm and supportive; something like, “Wow Honey, you’re so sweet for getting all this done to surprise me and for trying so hard to help out when you just had surgery. I’m so amazed by how you pushed through and did so much despite being weak and in pain. I have the most resilient, strong, thoughtful, wonderful wife in the whole world!”

That’s what I imagined her saying, but what she really said was more along the lines of, “While I appreciate your intention, doing all this when you’re suppose to be healing isn’t all that admirable.”

She shoots. She scores.

I love how life teaches especially when we aren’t even looking to learn anything. I love how the most ordinary experiences of our daily lives drive home the deeper truths we know in theory but often fail to remember or practice.  That’s why after D sent me downstairs to retire to the recliner while she tidied up my well-intentioned mess, I thought about how right she was….again. It wasn’t my responsibility to make the bed or clean the kitchen or fold the laundry. There would be other days for that but I wasn’t suppose to be doing any of that so soon after surgery. The only thing expected of me for the time being was that I breathe, rest, nap, and eat. I was suppose to be healing.

There are times in life when we’re all confronted with our humanity, mortality, and vulnerability. Physical illness. Emotional heartbreak. Spiritual injury. We get sick. Our hearts are broken. Our spirits are shattered.

In one way or another we’re confronted by our weakness and then give ourselves about three minutes before we start thinking we need to hurry up and get better. We look at others who’ve gone through the same thing we’re going through and have come back into themselves and we feel guilty because we think we should be as far down the road as they are. We shouldn’t still feel so needy and weak and vulnerable and the more time goes by the more our self-talk takes on the edge of a drill sergeant.  Pull yourself up by the bootstraps Girlfriend! Ignore the pain and push on through. You’ve been sick, grieving, depressed, confused, long enough and you need to snap out of it! Come on Soldier! How long are you going to lay there in the mud? Get up! Get up! Get up! Woman-up you wimpy little punk!

Behind D’s admonishment to me was a familiar spiritual truth that was ground into the fiber of another individuals’ being centuries ago . . . “To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under heaven” (Ecclesiastes 3:1). When your body is weak and in need of renewed strength, when your heart is broken and in need of mending, when your spirit has been damaged and is in need of restoration, the most important thing you have to do before you is to heal. God and the universe combined has no greater expectation of you than that.

How long will it take for me to heal?
It will take as long as it takes…for you.

How will my healing come?
It will come in the way it will come…for you.

Maybe we think we should experience healing sooner than we are. After all, the people that came to Jesus in need of healing got it right away; a woman touched the edge of his garment and her bleeding stopped, the blind man’s eyes were opened as soon as the dirt mixed with Jesus’ spit was wiped away, the open sores covering the lepers fell away before they could enter the temple, and all forms of spiritual and emotional bondage bolted out of people at the sound of his voice. Jesus healed all these in an instant so we wonder why it seems to take so long for our own healing to come but maybe the reason we wonder is because we fail to remember that all those who were healed with a touch or a word or a spitball had been living their lives in pain and suffering long before encountering the healing touch of Christ. The woman had bled for years and exhausted all other options. The lepers had lived on the edge of society away from their families. For all we know the blind man had one been a blind boy. And from where each of these people stood, their healing didn’t just happen overnight but it came to them after a lifetime of night after night filled with sickness and sorrow. Why did they have to live so long with pain before their healing came? I don’t know the answer to that anymore than I know why you’re grieving continues and your deepest questions find no comforting answers.

I only know that your healing will take as long as it takes and it will come in the way that it comes, and when it comes and however it comes, it will be by the power and goodness of a loving God.

It’s been a week since I was reminded that my physical healing is going to take time and with every passing day it’s true that I’m getting a little stronger. And so this morning I took a shower, ate breakfast and drove to the store to get a few things for dinner. I came home, sat in my recliner and began this post and one minute after I click on the publish button I’m going to take a nap. That’s not because there aren’t other chores to do around the house today but for the time being the most important thing for me to tend to is to rest and heal.

D said so. And I suspect God does too.

Okay. Time to get to the task at hand.

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Posted in Grace Meditations, Storytelling