Reach

I went into the hospital in June of 2004 with a herxheimer reaction that ended for me any questions that I might not really be sick. I was having convulsions and I couldn’t stand up, let alone walk. I was in an incredible place with God at the time, and I went into the hospital with hope and a lot of trust that He knew what He was doing. I was initially placed in a repurposed maternity ward with a window from which I could see sunlight and trees over the hospital’s roof.

There was a doctor there who was baffled by the God-conversations I had with my visitors, baffled by the joy he saw in me. His Buddhist faith could not account for my illness when I seemed so happy. He told me that I confused him, that if I could just think myself well, I could get well.

But the IV they had given me contained 5% dextrose. Because I had a severe sugar sensitivity, the IV meant to help me actually weakened me, and the doctors began sending out my blood for diseases I could not possibly have had. One of these diseases was a highly contagious condition that was generally contracted in South America. Three days into my hospital stay, they moved me into isolation, a room with florescent lights and a window that looked into a wall blocking almost all of the light.

Sometime in the course of the next couple of days, God spoke quiet and firm in my heart, that I needed to speak the name of Jesus to the Buddhist doctor. He also told me that I needed to ask Him, believing, to bring my first love back.

As I waited for test results and felt myself growing weaker and more afraid, I began to trust less that I knew God. That I knew what He thought or how He worked. Was God just a place in my head that I went to in order to make things better, or was He a Person who would actually act on my behalf, who would fight for me?

During that nine-day stay, I never managed to ask Him for my first love, believing that He would cause him to come. Actually, I never did ask Him believing He would bring that boy back.

And I almost didn’t speak the name of Jesus to that Buddhist doctor. He came again, and I shut up. As soon as he left the room, I felt my spirit sink within me. I justified it to myself. I tried to convince myself that it was okay – people didn’t really go around speaking the name of Jesus to people anyway. He was a doctor; I was a patient.

But I’ve never been one to quantify people by their roles. In one sense, I suppose that makes me disrespectful. In another sense, I just see people as people. The important ones have the same struggles the unimportant ones have – they just hide it better, I think.

And I knew better than to gloss over the conviction in my heart.

But seven days in, having been transferred to another doctor, I didn’t know that I would ever be seeing the Buddhist doctor again.

Seven days in, we figured out the dextrose issue, and they pulled the IV. At nine days, I was again strong enough to leave the hospital. All of the tests they had run had come back negative. My first love hadn’t come. I was surrounded by the biggest mess I’d ever been in, the past, the unknown future, and the very uncertain present.

On the ninth day, I sat up in my bed with an anger that I’d never known before, listened rebelliously to “It’s a Good Day” on the CD player my sister had brought for me, and steeled myself to face the wreckage.

And into this walked the Buddhist doctor, to say goodbye. To tell me that my second Lyme test had come back negative. Regardless of the fact that I had two positive tests from other doctors. I reached into the mess of my racing heart and looked him in the eye, unable to leave without saying what I knew I had to say.

“I’m supposed to speak the name of Jesus to you.”

The man physically reeled. He looked as if I had slapped him. I stopped breathing, shocked at the force of his reaction.

Shaken, he recovered as best he could, telling me that he knew Jesus, and Buddha, and a list of other names that I’ve lost to time and brain fog and irrelevance.

I left the hospital and read through the book of Job. And then I started back to work, all the while questioning the love of God, questioning the real depth of my relationship with Him, questioning everything I was and everything I would become.

There is no question in my heart that I will meet the Buddhist doctor again someday. That God put me in that place for that time to speak Jesus into a life that He intended to redeem.

Several years later, I told God I didn’t want to be used anymore. I wasn’t going to be good for Him anymore. It took me several years to figure out that I’d stopped trusting Him somewhere around day three of my hospital stay. That I didn’t want His purpose so much as He wanted His purpose.

I didn’t know how to trust a God who could let everything in my life fall apart and somehow, at the same time, be FOR me.

I have since come to see that I can’t lock God into my idea of who He should be, but I still struggle with that sense of betrayal. The boy who never came back. The life I live now. The pain I see falling into others’ lives that rips me apart and raises my fears.

I don’t swallow spiritual platitudes. I don’t jump on religious bandwagons or follow a set of principles. I have a hard time going to church without becoming physically ill.

If my faith is to be real, then the God I place it in must be real. If He is to be any real comfort, the fears I have must be real. If He is to really heal, then I must be really broken. If He is to give grace, then I must be humble enough to receive it.

At least in this place where I fight against the way my life has broken apart, I know He doesn’t despise me. He says He doesn’t. That this is the sacrifice He desires.

I don’t GET how He uses me now. I’m an exhausted mess of a girl who hardly dares to speak of God because He seems too much sometimes. I am the weak and the fool, the Jeremiah who says “I cannot speak” and “they’ll look down on me,” and then writes my sorrow and my doubts and my fears out without the victory half the time, knowing that my only hope is in God who must have something other than all of this mess in mind for us.

“Don’t add to the wound of the world,” she says, “count the gifts He gives and you can’t be afraid.” She has known much loss of her own, and I read 13 pages into her story and could read no further, overwhelmed by what I saw in her first memory.

“Give thanks in all things,” Paul said, and “Whatsoever you do, do all in the name of Jesus.”

So in the name of Jesus, I tell the truth about the things that hurt and try to make sense out of my life without any forthcoming answers from heaven. I try to step back and look at the people who have cared for me, to see their hearts through a haze of unresolved pain. I try not to be afraid and I ask God where the joy comes from, when is it real, and when will I not be making it up?

And in Jesus’ name, I ask God why He cared more about a Buddhist doctor than He cared about me, and all He says is that “you knew Me, and he didn’t.”

This mess of a life I live isn’t about being one whom God uses greatly. It’s not about being great or being small, it’s just about God being God, and me being me as He made me, and letting Him work out the details so that the real of me honors the real of Him, whether I thank Him for air conditioning and thick green grass and nobody knows but Him, or whether speaking Him out through my wreckage sends others to Him for an encounter of their own.

Ann sees the first sin as ingratitude (I am not content with what God has given me), and I see it as God-grasping (I will be like the Most High), and this is what God has given us both, and we are not wrong but not God either.

I hope every day that there is an “other side” of all this for me. I really do want to be happy. I really do want to be grateful. I don’t want to deepen the wound of the world – but God tells me to see the wound of the world that He created, and to see how we all groan soul-deep for Him, and how will we know it is a wound if we pretend it is not there, or think it can be repaired by the force of our human will?

I would shut my eyes to it if I could. I would hide myself away from it so it could not touch me. But it has already touched me, before I knew it could. Nine days in a hospital without a diagnosis, a first love that never returned for me, years living in the wreckage that followed both and all the doubts I should never have had about God being raised the way I was and knowing what I knew about Him.

But that was just it. I only knew it about Him. Now I know Him. And I know this: how Jesus stands between me and Him, and how everything on earth that matters to me can be taken from me and I will still know Him right where I am because of His Son.

And oh how I pray I learn to receive the good He is without fear.