On One Year of Being Sick

A year ago, this week, I drove a couple dear friends to the airport after a few days of eating good food, coffee shop-hopping, and walking the city I now call home. I worked a couple shifts at work. I cleaned up after piling two more people in an apartment barely meant for the four who already lived there. I got dinner with my boyfriend. Caught up on some neglected schoolwork. On Sunday, I handed out mics and worked the sound board, but into the second service, my wrists were throbbing and aching.
Too much typing? Did I fall sometime recently and not remember?
The more I typed and moved, the worse they hurt until I feared they were somehow broken. I drove down to a CVS during the pastor’s sermon to buy wraps to stabilize them, and I finished out the services.
The urgent care doctors said they both seemed sprained and asked me how I’d done it. I hadn’t done anything at all.
Within the week, the pain had spread throughout nearly every joint in my body. My ankles and knees were swollen, and I could barely walk without my hips and knees aching.

A year later, and it’s not much different. I’ve learned ways to manage it, and it hasn’t been as bad as those first few months, but I’m achey, dizzy, foggy, and sick to my stomach, and no one really knows why. Even writing this article took nearly a week, when it would have taken just a few hours before.

I’m sick without a diagnosis.

As quickly as this year has gone (weren’t my first lab tests just a couple months ago?), I’m not sure I would even recognize myself from a year ago. A-year-ago-me was not necessarily immature, but she knew far less about her own weakness than I do today. And that was my first important lesson learned this year:

You are far weaker than you think.

Far weaker. Think of yourself in your weakest state. In the hospital, very sick or injured, at your physically weakest. Or if you’ve never been in the hospital, the sickest sick you have ever experienced—bedridden, unable to stand upright, sinking into the mattress. Or maybe you’ve been stricken down by a mental illness—sent to the floor of your bedroom, no comfort to be found and a debilitating battle in your mind. You know you are weak.
But you are even weaker than that.

Pre-chronic illness, I had been very sick, and in fact, had always considered myself a relatively sickly person. I was always the first person to catch whatever was going around, and I was pretty much sick most of the time. I knew I was “weak.” But once I could not lift my hands to wash my hair and had to have friends put my hair up for work, I felt my true helplessness.
No matter how together or powerful you may feel, your life and ability could vanish in a second.
All the running and eating right and dancing and working out I did did not prevent me from getting sick. The job I had, the car I saved up for, the apartment in the city—those things did not protect me from an outside threat to my life. My spiritual life and the devotions I (at least tried to) maintain—these things did not protect me from getting sick. Regardless of anything I worked hard for or disciplined myself into practicing, I still got sick, and it still has the potential to worsen. Just like none of those things care if you step out into a busy street, none of those things care about an autoimmune disease.

I don’t say any of these things to garner pity; I say them to remind you that nothing you do can build or preserve your power when God plans to display your weakness.

I often get pulled back to Ecclesiastes when pondering these things.
The author tells us that our lives are just a vapor. Here for a moment and gone--he reminds us that we are not nearly as powerful or lasting as we often feel.
“All are from the dust, and to dust all return” (3:20).
Just like my broken body came from dust, one day it will fail and waste away, right back to the dust it came from.
If your weakness hasn’t been on full display yet, one day it will be.

BUT-
He is stronger than you know.

As strong as you imagine God to be, he is stronger than that.
In displaying your weakness, God displays his strength.
He has the power to heal, yes, but also to universally end sickness and death forever—and he will. Not just the one sickness plaguing you, but every sickness in every person.
Cancer, Crohn’s, Celiac’s, Arthritis, Lupus, MS, Lyme Disease, POTS, pneumonia, Covid, Scleroderma, Parkinson’s, dementia, Alzheimers, all the deficiencies and muscle weaknesses, every illness you can find in a textbook, and every sickness that has not even been discovered yet—every last one will be done away with.
He has the power to sustain you through the hardest hardship, the most intense sickness, the longest flare-up, and the darkest valley. Those places are not meant to be solo feats of endurance—they are impossible alone. These are places where God scoops you up off the floor and walks you limping to the other side, so that when anyone asks how you even survived it, you can only say it was him.  

I have found great comfort in the words of David in Psalm 18. In this Psalm, David has just been delivered from the hand of his enemies, and Saul. The psalm powerfully describes the way David was delivered, comparing his situation to “deep waters,” “disaster,” and “the cords of death and the grave.” He describes God in language that would strike those able to visualize it to intense fear. The earth shakes under his anger. Smoke and fire come pouring out of his mouth, and the heavens part for him to descend. He sends arrows down upon his enemies and lays bare the foundations of the world with a mere breath.

But the first line of the psalm is “I love you, Lord, my strength” (18:1).

“I love you, Lord, my strength.”

Though we are in deep waters, quicksand, a mire that sucks us in and holds us hostage,
even though we cannot see our hands in front of our faces, and we are doubled over in pain,
even though our God is so big and powerful that he can shake the earth with a word and split the heavens at a thought,
He is and remains our strength.
And he loves us.

He provides strength to the weak (34), a shield for the defenseless (35), and a wide path for the buckling ankles (36).
He cares about his children enough to meet them on the floors of their bedrooms and hold their aching joints in his hands.
He is powerful enough to send every illness that has killed millions flying out past the end of the galaxy, never to afflict another broken body again.
He is great enough that once we enter eternity with him, cancer and Crohn’s and scleroderma will hardly receive a passing thought, and they certainly will not be the subject of our tears anymore.

So, in a growing realization of my weakness, I have also seen the power of God.
My body fails me daily, but my God does not. The weaker I find myself, the stronger I know God to be, and he is even stronger than that.

I love you, Lord, my strength.