Hamsters and Potters

It's strange how sometimes I feel like an entirely different person these days than the one I was before receiving my diagnosis. Heck, I feel different today than I did yesterday, and than I did the day before. It's hard to explain, but I keep seeing my mind as a plate. I used to fill up my plate with everything that would fit on it--work, graduate school, being a mother and a wife and a daughter and a sister and a friend. Not one hour of my time was unaccounted for. Now I still see the plate, but there only seems to be room on it for one kind of food, even though it is just as full as it was before. All the rest seems to have dropped away. It's an irony. Now that I have the time for many different kinds of activities, I don't have the energy or the inclination to do a single thing. It's a stasis, a waiting that seems to fill up every minute of every day. I feel like I'm in a place of restless dread, ready for the surgery that will heal me but scared to death at the same time. Can it hurry up and get here already? Can it all just go away?

This is perhaps the mystery of suffering. We must suffer--all of creation does--but what for? Only humans seek meaning in their anguish, and I am no exception. This is happening for a reason. I know I am here to learn and to grow, but couldn't I just take a class or read it in a book? I've been feeling angry this week. Yelling, glass breaking, lots of tears. I was busy, involved in a hundred different projects. This really wasn't a good time for me to have my plans interrupted. Could I please get back to my life?

And then I understand--this is my life. After forty years of relative ease, a little suffering. Just like everyone else. So as I see it, I have two choices. I can burrow, hide, allow my fear and sorrow to overwhelm every minute of every day. Or I can accept that this, too, is a part of who I am, and who I am becoming. I will be changed, to be sure, but perhaps a good changed. More and better than I was before.

Dave Stoecklein, our amazing pastor, explains it this way: there are two views of suffering. One is something he calls "hamster-wheel suffering." We turn and turn and turn but accomplish nothing. Our suffering is futile. We do all the work that suffering brings with it, but in the end, we learn nothing and don't grow at all. The second kind of suffering he describes as "pottery-wheel suffering." We turn and turn and turn, as before, but in this turning, something is accomplished. An object of beauty is created. Art.

This is what I choose for myself. God has promised that my suffering will develop my character. He did not choose this illness for me, this fear for my family, the helplessness and anger and bitter tears, but he has the ability to use what he hates to make what he loves--people of deep faith. Those who love more, judge less, see others with compassion and grace. This is who I want to be. And so I will continue to trust that I am not alone, that although I am afraid, even though the pathway seems dark and overgrown right now, God is with me, working through every circumstance in my life to mold and make me into the woman he knows I can be. I want to be art.

This is the verse that helps today: "I'm absolutely convinced that nothing--nothing living or dead, angelic or demonic, today or tomorrow, high or low, thinkable or unthinkable--absolutely nothing can get between us and God's love because of the way that Jesus our Master has embraced us" (Romans 8:39, The Message paraphrase).