Everything hurt and I was afraid to move. But I had to go to the bathroom. I lay there planning the best, least painful strategy to get from horizontal to vertical. I dreaded it.
Working up the courage, I used my arms to lift my legs and move them slowly to the edge of the bed. If I could swing them off, I'd be most of the way there. There was an obstacle course of pillows to move and every twitch, every slow careful movement was accompanied with suspenseful breaths. Will this be OK?
I finally got my feet to the floor.
"Oh, for the love of all things holy, please do not jump on me, Zander."
His excited eyes dimmed.
My hand pressed against the bedside table and lifted me up. I leaned against the wall as I slowly hobbled to the bathroom, already planning for how I might manage all the logistics once I got there.
The thing about muscle injuries is that it is terrifying to try to move. The thought of movement fires the nerve, the nerve contracts to the muscle and also, the nerve registers the pain. So sometimes even the thought of moving is painful. In fact, sometimes the thought of moving is more painful than the actual moving.
But muscles and nerves need to work together to heal the injury -- movement is part of the healing process. Even though it hurts.
I spent the day pondering about other forms of healing that hurts. Much of it does -- getting stitches, fixing a cavity, washing out a cut, putting a dislocated bone back in place. This pain is often accompanied by fear. It feels like there is a choice that sometimes I don't want to make -- accept mild discomfort with status quo or risk a greater pain to try to heal it.
The thing is, healing isn't always garuanteed. It's probable. But there is an element of faith involved.
Spiritual and emotional healing can look like this too. There is a big discomfort in naming something that is broken within me. Saying it out loud and admitting it is there. Repentance. Brokenness. Vulnerability. Creating space for God to heal me is to first receive the pain associated with that broken piece of myself. There might be practices, like PT, that God reforms my heart and soul through repeated movement in the uncomfortable ways of wholeness. Then one day, I am healed and I look back to who I was and I see that somethings that were once hard are now easy.
Christ choose this kind of healing too. Satan confronted him in the desert with the greatest of temptations -- "there's a way to wholeness without suffering"
But Jesus didn't take it.
I've long wrestled with the cross. There is so much about it that doesn't make sense. Surely God could redeem a broken world without entering into the brokenness. Surely God could heal us with a magic that doesn't require the process to hurt.
But sometimes the healing is IN the pain. It is the pain itself that heals. And summoning up the courage to enter into the healing is also part of the healing. Jesus healed us and Jesus is taught us how to be healed by going ahead of us and showing us what it looks like.
Today I moved around. I stretched. I walked. I took myself to the pool. I entered into my Owen path of healing. It hurt but I can tell I'm starting to mend.
May you have courage to enter into healing whenever God invites you to it. Even if it hurts a little. Amen.
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