In Sickness and in Faith

This is from March's Breakpoint Worldview magazine. I wanted to share it with you guys because it really touched me.

In Sickness and in Faith
By Kim Moreland

Overcoming the Darkness

What should have been for me a relatively simple operation turned into a 15-day hospital odyssey because of a life-threatening infection. The great torment in my soul increased my miseries—I felt that God had turned His back on me. Further, I became plagued by medicinally induced nightmares of doom and dying. After the medication was discontinued, the nightmares ceased, but the darkness persisted.[1] Fervently, I prayed and pleaded with God to give me peace and show me His light. His answer was a continued sense of impenetrable blackness.
My experience—the darkness of my soul—is not uncommon for Christians. The key question is not whether we experience it, but how we react to it when we walk through those terrifying and soul-struggling times. Does the blackness of the moment trigger a person to denounce or lose his or her faith after such a shattering experience? Or does he or she continue believing in God’s divine sovereignty, through faith and hope, despite impenetrable darkness?[2]

SEARCHING FOR LIGHT
All things being equal I felt okay when I first woke up from surgery. My husband, Terry, was waiting for me in my room and spent the first two nights with me, which gave me a great sense of comfort. My daughter, grandson, and some siblings showed up the next day to sit with me. Sometimes I was awake and sometimes I was drifting during their conversations, but it did not matter because their chatter sent waves of peace through me. My son, more siblings, nieces and nephews, and aunties visited too. Relatives who lived too far away to visit called daily, and friends came to cheer me up. Their visits generated in me a wonderful sense of well-being.
However, instead of getting better, I was beginning to feel worse. By day five or six, I was having trouble pushing my IV pole through the halls to exercise, and in my mind, a sense of darkness and panic started descending.
Sickness is a very messy business. A day after surgery, my left arm started to hurt. I had developed phlebitis, an inflammation of the vein, which is painful. A nurse had to start another IV in a different site. After a day or so, that site became too inflamed to keep the needle in place, so they had to start a third IV. Around the time of the fourth IV insertion, with both arms inflamed, my chest started to hurt, and it became difficult to breath or move.
Images of blood clots flooded my mind, despite being injected with blood thinners. My doctor ordered a CT scan of my lungs and abdomen. My stomach started hurting, and an intermittent fever became a steady fever.
Steadily through this process, dark thoughts of dying crept into my mind. The only Scripture that I could remember was Psalm 23, and those six verses that should have brought me succor and peace did not.

A PERSISTENT DARKNESSAs I lay there feeling utterly sick and helpless, I ruminated on Chuck Colson’s and Richard John Neuhaus’s reflections about their experiences with life-threatening diseases. Why did I not have a feeling of calmness and peace like they did?
In the March and April 1987 issues of Jubilee, my friend (and boss!) Chuck Colson wrote his reflections about his ordeal with stomach cancer and infection. “I saw in the confrontation with fear and suffering that there is nothing for which God does not pour out His grace abundantly,” he recalled. “I felt total peace—and great thankfulness that a merciful God had brought me to that recovery room.”
Chuck, too, developed an infection and had a reaction to pain medication that gave him hallucinations like “dark creatures climbing walls, buildings collapsing, endless tunnels.” But when his medication wore off, he stopped having hallucinations. My darkness persisted.
A number of years before my dreadful illness, I had read Neuhaus’s book As I Lay Dying. Neuhaus suffered a multitude of traumas, starting with an exploding tumor and, a very short time later, a splenectomy. His ordeal included a coma and a visitation by two angels, or “presences” as he put it. The “two ‘presences’” told him, “Everything is ready now,” giving him a decision to stay and finish his ministry, or “go with them.” If he had gone with them, Neuhaus knew that “something would happen between here and where we were going, and that something is called death.”[3]
“At the time of crisis and the months of recovery following,” Neuhaus writes, “I was never once afraid.”[4] But I was desperately afraid. I did not want to die and leave my husband, my children, my grandchild, my beloved extended family, or my wonderful friends. I could not pray: “Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death.”[5] I was unable to articulate consciously what I felt. Theologian Vigen Guroian, however, ably expresses it in Life’s Living toward Dying: “Death would not be so bitter were it not that love makes life so sweet. Nor would death inspire such fear and dread were it not that it cuts us off from those whom we love and who love us.”[6] So while I could think of no other verse but Psalm 23, and was unable to pray or recite it, like Job, I continued “to argue my case with God.”[7] God, where are you?

WHERE WAS GOD?
Finally, the CT and blood test came back showing I had a massive infection called peritonitis. That morning with scalpel in hand, my doctor along with a nurse came to drain the infection. After my doctor reopened the incision, a thick yellowish-brown puss oozed from the wound. She pressed on my abdomen for a long while, forcing as much of the killer infection out. An hour later, another doctor and team inserted a PICC line into my arm.[8] Later, I was to have a second CT to see if I would need a second surgery. But where was God in my time of darkness and desperation?
I waited for news. Thankfully Penny, one of my siblings, came and sat with me for two days. She helped me to the bathroom, held my hand, and waited with me. Other family and friends came to visit, helping me with various needs. My beloved husband was there everyday after work, but where was God?
After being released to recover at home, I contemplated my fear and sense of God’s desertion. I pondered God’s purposes.[9] I pondered Christ’s suffering and resurrection, and I pondered His promise to send the Comforter. But where were They?
Then slowly as the days and weeks went by, I started realizing that though God was silent, He was still there. He was there when my wonderful family and friends came to visit and comfort me. He was there when each person helped shoulder some of my suffering. He was there morning and night, day after day, week after week, month after month, when Terry cleaned and repacked my wound.
In a search for greater understanding of my plight, I read different prayers and devotions like this section from a Puritan prayer, “The All-Good”:
Grant me to feel thee in fire, and food and every providence,and to see that thy many gifts and creaturesare but thy hands and fingers taking hold of me . . . [10]
Providentially, years before I became sick, God had already given me a gift that would help calm my mind during my recovery. In a 2003 First Things article, Carol Zaleski wrote about Mother Teresa’s struggle with spiritual darkness. Mother Teresa had answered God’s call to minister to those who lived in the gutters of India. After she started her new ministry, she experienced, writes Zaleski, “feelings of doubt, loneliness, and abandonment. God seemed absent, heaven empty, and bitterest of all, her own suffering seemed to count for nothing, ‘ . . . just that terrible pain of loss, of God not wanting me, of God not being God, of God not really existing.’” [11] In the newest biography of Mother Teresa, I learned that despite her “terrible darkness,” this extraordinarily faithful woman would “refuse nothing to God . . . ” She continued her work in the gutters of India bringing Jesus to the poorest of the poor, and in “loneliness” and “doubt” she continued to worship and glorify Him. [12]

GROWING THROUGH SUFFERING
Months later, when I remembered Mother Teresa’s experience, it dawned on me that, instead of directly giving me a sense of peace or sending heavenly angels of comfort, God allowed me to experience His silence so I could grow in Him. As we ought to express our utmost gratitude to God despite suffering, I endeavor to do so. I am also eternally grateful for others, like Mother Teresa, having traveled through the travail of God’s silence, because their words have been a source of strength in the face of my feelings of abandonment.
If it be consistent with thy eternal counsels,the purpose of thy grace,and the great ends of thy glory,then bestow upon me the blessings of thy comforts;If not, let me resign myself to thy wiser determinations. [13]
Thirteen months later, I can see my suffering in a clearer light. As Oswald Chambers writes, “Has God trusted you with a silence—a silence that is big with meaning? God’s silences are His answers . . . His silence is the sign that He is bringing you into a marvelous understanding of Himself.”
My fright, mourning, and confusion have mellowed to gratitude. I have mourned the blackness and scariness of God’s turned shoulder and silence, but as Chambers asserts, “you will find that God has trusted you in the most intimate way possible, with an absolute silence, not of despair, but of pleasure, because He saw that you could stand a bigger revelation.”[14]
My God, let me resign myself to thy wiser determinations.
While I have given a great many nods to living in the present moment and trusting completely in God’s design and purpose, oftentimes I found myself trying to straddle the past and future: “I should have done this or that, or I hope this or that does or does not happen.” As for an encounter with death, “[t]he worst thing is,” writes Neuhaus, “not to be changed by the encounter.”[15]
I have changed. Living in the present moment has become easier. I am truly grateful to God that He put loving people in my life to help shoulder my burden, and I am utterly grateful that He allowed me to live.
Oh blessed Father, help me to resign myself to thy wiser determinations.
Lastly, I have made the very personal struggles of my body, mind, and spirit public so that when you or someone near you walks through dark and scary times, you will remember or share with others that God is there even if He is silent. Continue always to have faith and hope in Him, despite the fears, doubts, and soul-struggling bleakness you experience, because God is carrying out His divine plan for you.