On calling, obedience, frailty, and trusting God

Or, why is making yourself sick for the gospel holy, but just being sick is not?

This is part of a series about the effects of Radical Christianity on our expectation of what the faithful Christian life is supposed to look like. Read part 1, part 2, part 3, and part 4 to get up to speed.

I shifted in the chair, the dimly lit lamp next to my right shoulder softening the reality that I had found myself in yet another doctor’s office after 4 years of mysterious joint pain, migraine, fatigue, and ER visits. This office was so different from the unforgiving fluorescent lights of all the others. The doctors under their glare had left me feeling vulnerable and exposed, and yet had not been unable to illuminate what was wrong in my body. This doctor started, not with tallies and tests, but by listening to my story in that softly lit exam room.

“Tell me when your symptoms started. What was going on in your life at the time?” he asked.

I shared that I had battled a lot of sickness as a child. My history with migraine disease began when I was only 4 or 5 years old. But an experience the summer I turned 15 had knocked me on my back, and since then I had not been able to get back up. Joint pain that began in my hips steadily slunk outward into my limbs until even walking and typing were at times untenable. Migraine episodes now happened as frequently as 5 days a week. Each morning I woke up feeling as if a steam roller had pasted me to the mattress.

What happened in a moment that had caused my health to cascade over this cliff of unwellness? An attempted robbery at gunpoint while on a short-term mission trip to Zambia.

“I believe you have fibromyalgia,” my new gentle doctor said (I had decided the moment I walked into that calming office that I would stay). “Your body was likely already predisposed to developing it, but that traumatic experience switched your body into fight/flight mode, and now it’s stuck there.”

One would have expected my response to be grief, disbelief, or horror that I would have to live with some level of this chronic pain for the rest of my life (fibromyalgia has no cure, my doctor explained). But, no, my response was indignation. I told my doctor that I was supposed to leave for Sudan in just a few months for a Bible translation internship.

That’s when he broke the news that would break the straight and narrow path in front of me into a tangle of possibilities I never asked for.

“I’m sorry, but it’s likely that you’ll never be able to live in a rural area overseas without access to reliable medical care.”

I believed God had called me to the mission field. I had been training, preparing for years. I was three years into a degree in applied linguistics, parsing Greek verbs and deciphering the Hebrew alphabet in between debilitating migraine episodes. I had been prepared for sickness to challenge my resolve on the field. Malaria, food poisoning, or whatever name dysentery goes by these days. But now my obedience in short-term preparation had somehow resulted in an obstacle that might prevent me from long-term obedience.

God, I prayed, so few people are willing to go overseas. Why are you doing this to me? This doesn’t make any sense.

February marked 10 years since my diagnosis in that unusual doctor’s office, and it’s taken me nearly that long to untangle my beliefs about calling, obedience, frailty, and trusting God.

I’ve learned that calling is both a simpler and more slippery idea than missionary biographies and youth conferences and short-term mission trips led me to believe.

I’ve had to unlearn the insidious, ableist lie that somehow making yourself sick for the sake of the gospel is holy, but just being sick is not.

I’ve learned that the kingdom of God doesn’t require a few of us to be radical but for all of us to be faithful. And sometimes the most radical thing we can do is show up for the ordinary routines of our lives. For me that looked like years of endless medical appointments, and pills every morning, and nightly baths, and gentle stretching, and nourishing foods, and hours in therapy.

More than anything, I’ve learned that God’s will is more like the lamp in that doctor’s office than a fluorescent light overhead that reveals every detail of our futures from now until eternity. And every day, with Scripture and the Holy Spirit as my guides, I am learning to carry that light with me as I take one step, then another, and another.

Beauty in the Ordinary
I’m in Michigan this week at the Festival of Faith and Writing. On my flight here I couldn’t help but capture this sweet moment.

This sweet elderly couple held hands during takeoff and landing and worked together to complete a crossword puzzle during the flight. #goals

Beauty in Nature
The heavens declare the glory of God. In California we didn’t get to experience a total eclipse, but this moment was still pretty special.

Do you see the crescents in the shadows near my sweet boy’s feet?

In pursuit of Beauty,