I remember watching the movie, Shadowlands, at a particularly low point in my life. The main character who was playing Joy Gresham, C.S. Lewis's wife, said something to the effect, "The joy we're experiencing now is part of the pain we'll endure later. It's part of the deal." Those words haunted me that day because I didn't want to believe them. How can joy be part of suffering? Why should that be “part of the deal?” It just doesn't seem fair. And who made this deal anyway? I think maybe she had gained knowledge about suffering that I have yet to at this point in my life. She had made peace with it.
It reminds me a lot of my mom. Watching her endure so much suffering over the years, one thing I've observed is that she also seems to have made peace with it. She accepts it as “part of the deal.” If there were such a thing as a doctorate of suffering, she most certainly would have earned hers. From childhood on, she has experienced serious health problems; from kidney failure, to cancer, to strokes. She's been through multiple surgeries, endured treatments at the hands of many doctors, and, at the height of one of her more serious health conditions, her husband of thirty plus years left her.
She's been a model of suffering for me, not really because of what she's endured, but because of how she's endured it. It's not that she hasn't questioned it, or shown grief, or been real about her struggles. The thing that's impacted me the most is the faith she still clings to after all of these trials; the faith that she maintains in spite of, or maybe because of, the obstacles she's faced. Faith that believes that the God who made her will never fail or forsake her. She is, in my eyes, a champion of faith and always will be. No, she hasn’t overcome her suffering. In reality, she deals with it everyday. But she has persevered through it, through all of it. Maybe, when all is said and done, this is the essential and only thing that matters about trials. It is not about what happens to us when we suffer, it is about what becomes of us.
April 19, 2011
It has been twelve years since I started this, and things have come full circle. In the introduction, I wrote that I had yet to gain insight into the comment that pain, is “part of the deal.” After years of struggling with my own personal demons, I’ve come to understand it better. I was diagnosed bipolar when I was 31 years old. It’s been six years since the diagnosis, and I’m glad to say that life is so much better than it used to be. But there are still days when I wonder, 'Lord, why me?' It’s on those days that the faith of my mother lives on. What I’ve seen in her life, I now cling to in my own. If it were not for her model, I would never have learned to be content in all things and to persevere no matter how badly I want to give up. I love the way these lessons have been instilled in me, not so much by what my mom has said, but by how she has lived.
No comments:
Post a Comment