“It grieves me to see you so diminished.”
My dad says that sometimes, when I’m having bad days with Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, and I’m in too much pain to move. I understand exactly what he means. Before I got sick, I used to be able to life huge weights and carry them around, to walk for miles, and to build with him these huge creative projects. I’ve lost much of my ability to do any of that these days, lost so much potential, so much of myself. It’s a good day when, by seven P.M. or so, I’m not actively trying not to pass out as I limp to my dorm, occasionally needing the help of both my cane and a friend to keep me upright before finally collapsing into bed. I feel diminished. I feel as if everything I did and everything I was has been torn away from me, like all my strength is useless and dead. I have felt like many of my friends, especially those who have known me since before I got sick, have seen this diminishment and have run from it, unable to deal with the fact that someone who used to be identified by physical power now is identified by her lack of it. I’ve felt lonely and, yes, furious at the coldness of fate or allowance of God that let me be afflicted and diminished by this disease. I’ve begged to be healed and tried to come to terms with the fact that it might not happen. I’ve grieved the me I’ve lost.
But is this really the end? Am I really diminished as much as I’ve thought?
I am learning something, readers. I’m learning that God never takes away our strengths, only edits them to bring them closer to His strengths. Nothing good is ever lost when we lose ourselves. It’s merely having all the impurities burned off of it.
I still lift and carry, every day that my head feels too heavy for my skull and I continue to hold it upright and every day that I consent to carrying this cross forward and singing about it as I go. I still walk for miles, every day when each step feels like running a marathon and, yet, I don’t stop walking as long as I’m talking to Christ about His Via Crucis along the way (the hill of Franciscan has taught me so much about Jesus, guys!) I don’t stop building, but instead of building barns and walls, I’m building people every day that I accept God’s calling for me to be a writer and a friend and a minister to the people He’s given me. My potential isn’t lost. It’s perfected, just like these strengths have been, with all the nasty brokenness burned off of it through suffering and loss. They’ve been brought into line with what I was truly called to do.
I never lost an ounce of the strength I had. I’ve just learned what I was really given it for.
Love to all!
-A very feverish and probably babbling, but definitely sure that you needed to know this, Tani
Surrender the Brownies 