Flickers of joy

 I will try hard not to complain, but these last three weeks have been a comedy of the absurd. We never laughed in the midst of it all, not even once.

It’s all about getting older and the inevitable rebellion of body parts.

And it’s about my husband who has given permission for me to write about it.

Three weekends ago he came down with stomach/intestinal pain that seemed different from what he’s experienced before. So we did what we usually do in these circumstances. He took it easy, ate bland food, and we decided to wait it out. Most things get better in time without medical intervention. But after two days Hal told me to take him in to emergency. Enough was enough. I did and it turned out to be diverticulitis. Again. We were in time. The good doctor put him on a ten-day regimen of antibiotics with grim sounding names. We’ve met these fellows before and have not developed a friendship, I’m sorry to say.

Next, while still on medication, he felt a hernia begin bulging out of his intestines. A lump on his abdomen. Gross, no? So we got an appointment with our primary care doctor who miraculously agreed to see us right away. She wrote out a reference to an intestinal surgeon. We got an appointment a week away, and, in the meantime, a friend loaned us a belt that put pressure on the hernia, helping it stay in place. Great relief.

The relief didn’t last long. Hal began feeling pain in his neck and shoulders, something unusual for him. His back problems are located in the lower back. This was new. The pain grew with each day but we decided again to wait it out.

Our appointment with the intestinal surgeon was Friday morning. We got ready early and walked out to the car with enough time to make it to the doctor’s office. As I approached the car, I pressed the unlock button on the remote and wondered why the light didn’t blink. Too much sun, I figured. Hard to see. But we discovered it wasn’t the sun at all. The car was “dead.” Totally unresponsive. We called around and found a driver, but by then we knew we’d arrive late. I call the doctor’s office to tell them we were running a little late, and the receptionist told us the doctor was on a tight schedule and we’d have to reschedule, bulging hernia and all. Our appointment was now some ten days off. “God knows all this,” we told ourselves. “We’re in his hands.”

Hal called our auto repairman and he came over. Turns out it wasn’t just a recharge but a new battery we needed. The shop took care of it that day. (Some things run smoothly, thank God.)

At 2:00 a.m. Saturday morning, Hal woke me up, told me he couldn’t stand the neck pain any longer. We needed to go to the ER again. Turns out it was good we did. The doctor (a different one this time around) put him on a scary combination of morphine and cortical steroids and we went home, hoping this would be our last trip.

It was (so far) and Hal has been able to limit his intake of morphine. The pain is lessening, leaving us free to attend to the hernia. Our rescheduled appointment is still a week off. The story hasn’t ended.

We’re realizing that at our time of life, this show will likely keep going on and on, hopefully with some long intermissions.

Now for the good part. Saturday evening our son, daughter (both now in their fifties!), and two grandchildren came over to pray for Grandpa. We all gathered around him on the bed and laid hands (carefully) on him. We thanked God for his power and love, asked for physical and emotional healing, encouraged, and even gave some prophetic words about future ministry. Then the kids prayed for me and my chronic dizziness. The prayer meeting lasted over an hour. We were especially moved by our 18-year-old granddaughter’s insightful and impassioned prayers. It’s hard to describe what it feels like to be ministered to by your kids and grandkids. It’s good. We all felt that something real had been accomplished.

Hal woke up the next morning feeling good, although the pain returned by the evening, to a lesser degree. We know that, while some healings are instantaneous, God often heals in a gradual way. At least for us that seems to be the case. We feel that God is healing through the combination of prayer and medication. And possibly surgery.

Sunday afternoon we went to church online. One of our favorite places is Woodland Hills Church in Minneapolis. Greg Boyd has long been a favorite author, and his preaching is always rich, scholarly, but down-to-earth and anointed. He had just been through a grizzly three weeks, worse than ours, that involved five trips to the ER, including one for his wife who fell and broke her ankle in the middle of her husband’s trials. He preached from his home as he is not able to go out yet. But he was as articulate, funny, and profound as usual.

He told about his misadventures in detail, but focused on the lesson God was teaching him in all of this. It centered on the strange New Testament coming together of suffering and joy. Take the Apostle James’ strange counter-intuitive command to “consider it all joy, my brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of many kinds” (James 1:2). The various verses on “participating in the sufferings of Christ” came to his mind. At one point he had a vision (through his imagination) of Christ’s excruciating, but voluntary, suffering on the cross, and what a privilege it is to count our troubles as sharing in those sufferings.

Boyd told us that, while he didn’t exactly break out in laughter, he began feeling flickers of joy, laying there on the emergency room table. Joy in suffering is not natural or easy, but the experience of pain and trauma is the classroom for learning joy, he told us.

That sermon came at the right time for us and we, too, are sensing flickers of joy.

As I wrote above, this particular story is not yet over, but we’re heading into it with lighter hearts—thanks mainly to our family’s prayers, helped along by sound teaching from our brother, Greg Boyd.

It makes me think that joy is an excellent tool to carry with us into the challenges and potential traumas of growing older. I love it when old people laugh. I think I’ll join their ranks.