Simply a Gift

Hello faithful family, friends, and followers, welcome and thank you for your interest. It has been a good week, and we are welcoming the cooling temps of early fall and the initial hints of changing colors in the fields and trees. Fall has always been my favorite season and I would have to say that it is even more so since the accident. By fall of that first year, Joy had really gained physical stamina and while we were still struggling with language and cognitive processing skills, longer and longer walks were becoming a regular part to our routine.

As I reflected on this week’s post, I was drawn to a more recent discovery for me, the writing of Kate Bowler. As those of you who have followed us know, I frequently write about my felt sense of God’s sufficiency, grace, and mercy, even in the most challenging times of our journey and detail it to some extent in my reflection on the subject here. But I am well aware, that while the experience was and is very real for me, there are those of you who are saying, “Well, that’s nice for you, but I have never experienced God that way.” Obviously there’s nothing I can do to prove or validate my and Joy’s feeling of God’s presence throughout this journey, but one of my hopes in the many quotations I use, is to offer perspectives shared by others that go beyond our personal story line alone. Over the summer a friend of ours asked if I was familiar with the writing of Kate Bowler and I had to say I was not. That was of course until I had quickly read three of her books in short order.

Bowler is Professor of Religious History at Duke University and author of several books including four New York Times best sellers. At 35, she was blindsided by Stage IV cancer and the aftermath of its grueling treatment. While certainly a completely different context from our accident, what I have appreciated most about Kate Bowler’s writing is her frankness and honesty about the reality of God’s presence and provision while also fully acknowledging the very real pain, anguish, and gut-punch moments of severe physical suffering - in whatever form it takes. Her account of the long physical, emotional, and spiritual battle which thankfully resulted in full remission of her cancer, while again being vastly different medically from our own, nonetheless, parallels closely the spiritual journey I have experienced and attempted to share through my writing.

While rather lengthy, here are some excerpts from Kate Bowler’s book, “Everything Happens for a Reason - And Other Lies I’ve Loved,” which resonated so strongly with me. Bowler writes:

In those first few days after my diagnosis, when I was in the hospital, I couldn’t see my son, I couldn’t get out of bed, and I couldn’t say for certain that I would survive the year. But I felt as though I’d uncovered something like a secret about faith. Even in lucid moments, I found my feelings so difficult to explain. I kept saying the same thing: “I don’t want to go back. I don’t want to go back.”

At a time when I should have felt abandoned by God, I was not reduced to ashes. I felt like I was floating, floating on the love and prayers of all those who hummed around me like worker bees, bringing notes and flowers and warm socks and quilts embroidered with words of encouragement. They came in like priests and mirrored back to me the face of Jesus.

That feeling stayed with me for months. In fact, I had grown so accustomed to that floating feeling that I started to panic at the prospect of losing it. So I began to ask friends, theologians, historians, pastors I knew, and nuns I liked, What am I going to do when it’s gone? And they knew exactly what I meant because they had either felt it themselves or read about it in great works of Christian theology. St. Augustine called it “the sweetness.” Thomas Aquinas called it something mystical like “the prophetic light.” But all said yes, it will go. The feelings will go...

But they offered me this small bit of certainty, and I clung to it. When the feelings recede like the tides, they said, they will leave an imprint. I would somehow be marked by the presence of an unbidden God.

It is not proof of anything. And it is nothing to boast about. It was simply a gift. I can’t reply to the thousands of emails with my own Five-Step Plan to Divine Health or series of powerful formulas, which guarantee results...

I can’t reconcile the way that the world is jolted by events that are wonderful and terrible, the gorgeous and the tragic. Except I am beginning to believe that these opposites do not cancel each other out. I see a middle-aged woman in the waiting room of the cancer clinic, her arms wrapped around the frail frame of her son. She squeezes him tightly, oblivious to the way he looks down at her sheepishly. He laughs after a minute, a hostage to her impervious love. Joy persists somehow and I soak it in. The horror of cancer has made everything seem like it is painted in bright colors. I think the same thoughts again and again: Life is so beautiful. Life is so hard.

So as I shared above, while different in many ways, Kate Bowler’s description of God’s presence experienced through her illness and recovery, mirrors the felt presence of God throughout our healing journey.

My/our prayer, is that you too, will be willing to seek and be open to the many and varied ways in which the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit choose to be revealed in our lives and the lives of those we love, whether in times of blessing or times of challenge.

And so let me leave you with the following encouragement from Isaiah when he writes:

Have you never heard?

Have you never understood?

The LORD is the everlasting God,

the Creator of all the earth.

He never grows weak or weary.

No one can measure the depths of his understanding.

He gives power to the weak

and strength to the powerless.

Even youths will become weak and tired,

and young men will fall in exhaustion.

But those who trust in the LORD will find new strength.

They will soar high on wings like eagles.

They will run and not grow weary.

They will walk and not faint. (Isa 40:28-31)