If God Is My Joy, Why Does My Heart Hurt?

The turmoil begins sometimes days and sometimes only hours before…

“If God is my joy, why does my heart hurt so?”

“If it is well with my soul, why can I not focus on my daily tasks?”

“If God is my light, why is there a foggy cloud over my heart and mind?

“What if…?”

“We’ve been having such a wonderful summer…it’s unprecedented, really. What if God is preparing us for something bad…”

“Seriously, what if…?”

“…”

The crazy, terminal thoughts roll and pitch, waking and sleeping all because an umbilical cord once attached his tiny body to mine and I still remember the smell of his infant head. It kicks in as surely as I need to eat or sleep and seemingly as biologically too. It’s as if my heart strings are tied to a scan calendar and it hurts.

What do you do with thoughts that are highly possible, but aren’t yet true.

How do you make your peace with the hard things while they loom like a threat on the horizon? 

Even though it’s very unlikely that tomorrow’s scans will yield anything other than stable results, it’s equally unlikely that I will ever stop waiting for that other shoe to drop like it’s 2012 all over again. The peace comes a little every four months, and then as the days and hours draw closer, once again, I realize that my resources were predictably finite and I’m back in the moment of re-learning every lesson I thought I already knew.

Typical. These reminder of pitfalls and brokenness. They seem not to ever leave me, but they can lead me one of two ways: I can veer into the path of self-condemnation, or I can choose to walk the path of my own weaknesses with the help of a Strength far greater than my own.

So tonight, as I grow weary from rounding the corner on the fourth consecutive year of MRIs, and as my sweet bald boy grows increasingly quiet (a sign of his preoccupation) and dons his favorite Spider-Man costume in preparation for fighting the fear, I choose to once again see the brokenness for the road marker that it is: pointing me to the One who never grows weary in our lovingly hand-crafted journey.

Have I said all these words before? I probably have. But tonight, I needed to write them out again because in some ways, this small internet space is like the doorposts of my house. I need to paint it with the truth of life again and again because those truths are all that covers me and my family in the hard days and shadows.

And this boy, when I asked him if he wanted me to write anything special to you on the eve of his test, well, he just told me this:

“Tell them to pray for me, Mom. Tell them to pray for me and nothing else. I’ll just be brave. It’ll be okay.”

Oh Jesus, how we need you in the moment by moment.