My sister reminded me of how difficult it really is to "recover." My sister often called me an "impatient patient", and she was always right. It is hard to be patient with recovery because - quite frankly - you have to put up with a lot of crap.
You're stuck with people shooting off polished Christian platitudes, telling you to "Cheer up!" when they have no idea how much you're hurting. You have people who are angry with you for being unable to help them in their times of desperate need, even though both they and you realize that this is a completely unreasonable sentiment. You begin to suspect well-wishers of ulterior motives... that perhaps their encouragements are merely ways for them to feel better about themselves, as if they had done you a great favor by lavishing pity upon your poor and pity state.
You use your pain as a crutch and excuse to avoid your responsibilities and you hate those who call you out on it. You are frustrated with people because they just don't understand what you're going through... even though deep down inside, you are really just frustrated with the fact that you are weak weak weak weak weak.
While recovering from my own emotional pain, I wrote this e-mail to a friend who was also in the process of recuperating:
Recovering is tough. I know it was for me, and mine wasn't even that serious of a surgery or condition. My mind often flips back and forth between the present and the future: the present condition of being helpless and weak (which goes against with every feminine instinct in my body), and the anxiety over an uncertain future.
Since high school, I aspired to do medical missions somewhere in the boonie-lands of Africa or China or Oklahoma or similarly backwards country (i was in high school! young, naive and carried lotsa wild dreams)... and all of a sudden, I found myself unable to even help myself. All those dreams and visions and hopes put into doubt are still cast in doubt. It's been tough sometimes; realizing that you're weak is always tough. But looking back over the past five months, I don't think anything else could have been better for me. This "sickness" was the first step in breaking my addiction with myself, my own achievements and my belief in an infallible self. It forced me to face many sins in my own life.
It made me realize that the flurry of seemingly productive activity I engaged in was really just a smoke screen to distract me from a lot of problems and fundamental dissatisfactions with myself.I can't say that I've "fixed" all, or really any, of these things... but I'm learning to struggle with them once again.
If nothing else, I have learned that God is far wiser and stronger and kinder than we give Him credit for. Tragedy is never tragedy if Christ dwells within us, for our suffering only serves to make us more like Him. It has been one of the most painful, but beautiful, lessons that I've learned so far.So! Sage advice? Don't rush to get back into "the thick of things" so quickly. Listen, and listen carefully for the whispers of the divine.
You may never get the chance to listen like this ever again. One tune that was stuck in my head during my stay in a limbo state was a little chorus to a song. It goes, "I am alive in this moment; in this moment I am found. I am alive in this moment; in this moment I belong." The essence of patience is, as Henri Nouwen once put it, having "hope for the moment". Grasp that, and the moment is yours forever.
As the other "patients" I see who get sicker and sicker, I've developed more profound respect for those who persevere in recovery with joy and endurance. I've found that the people who complain the most are usually the ones with the most superficial problems. The most admirable people I know are those that maintain hope for the moment despite overwhelmingly grim circumstances.
Hope for the moment comes at the cost of the pleasure of indulgence in self-pity and self-loathing. Hope for the moment comes from humility and the recognition that this injury, this sickness, this handicap is merely an accurate reflection of the truly broken state of my heart... and that in Christ there is the indefatigable power to heal. It is a frightening and fearsome recognition because it demands that I lay aside the crutch of my pain and fall into the arms of something intangible and uncertain and something wholly other than myself.
Perhaps you are in a situation of transitions, of tortured waiting, of changes and healings or hurtings that take place "in-between". How are you coping, and how can we transform these moments of frustration, anxiety, and waiting into moments of hope? What does that hope look like?
