Feeling and healing

Dear Jan:

Last night you couldn't make it to the Sunday Night gathering. Your heart wanted to attend but your body just refused to cooperate. Being forced to sleep just highlighted the frustrating slow pace of healing and its side effects. How can you find some satisfaction in your everyday life when the choice is forced on you to stay and sleep instead of doing something fulfilling with your community? It seems that you have to subordinate even the simplest desires of your heart to the healing imperative, and everyone who knows how independent you are, also knows that this proposition won't work for you. You face a real quandary.

In this sticky situation, you are being pulled in many more directions. On the one hand, your healing implies staying with medication just to avoid more seizures which could cause more damage, the drawback is the drowsiness it causes, "my eyes want to stay closed all the time, my body does not want to stay awake, I sound and look dumb when I am not..." you say again and again. The process of healing looks as if it is a slow awakening to what life might be.

On the other hand, your emotions are very much on the surface of almost every interaction you haven: you cry when you can’t get your thoughts out, when movements are too fast, when you can’t remember where you left something, when the voices sound too loud, when the world just don’t seems to be the same, and there is little to laugh about, you sob, “this isn't life, it would be better just to go to sleep for good..." Some days disappointment and discouragement are so big that they look like the only option in the horizon is to push the stop button.

On the other hand, there is the resilient Jan we know that keeps walking tall and maintains faith high, this is the Jan that wants to think in the long term to keep things in perspective, this is the one that asks: “what is the lesson I need to learn from this? What is what I need to see in the middle of these circumstances? How can I internalize that God’s time is not my time? How can I live the fact that I am not my circumstances?” The inconveniences of the healing process are insignificant compared to the new lease on life you have been given and the new vision you have about pain, illness, suffering and life.

On the other hand, we know that we have each other and that one day we will look back and say: “Where did we get the strength to walk this far? Where did all these footprints on the way come from? How many people were walking alongside all the way?"


-Fede