All in Health and healing
In these days of coronavirus fear, everything around us is amplified. Our attention to the news is greater. Our perceptions of threats all around us are greater. In fact, every emotion we experience seems to be amplified. We’re all on edge, and our emotions run a hair trigger away from exploding. Most of us can go from calm to panic in 60 seconds flat. That is because our emotions are amplified. Everything we feel is amplified right now.
I’m sitting here eating Blue Bell ice cream out of the container and fretting because I can’t go to the gym. Don’t judge me; you’ve probably done the same. I do feel some comfort tonight, however, because now nobody can go to the gym – which means I’m not alone or being singled out anymore. Our city and county just announced a decree that in order to contain the novel coronavirus all restaurants, bars, clubs and gyms must close.
Before I entered my spinal cord injury doctor’s office for my check-up last week, I stopped by the men’s room near the elevator where I had my first sobbing fit two years ago. I was calmer now than I was on Dec. 22, 2017, when I had just been told it was a miracle I was walking.
It turns out I wasn’t there for the reason I thought I was. I was in Raleigh that night because both my driver and I needed hope. This is not one of those pastor stories that ends with someone saying the sinner’s prayer and getting baptized. And yet redemption traveled with us that night. Hope was born anew.
I got this mark placed on my inner bicep on about the one-year anniversary of when my body started rebelling against me. The meaning of the semicolon is this: “Your story is not over.” It’s not a period, which ends a sentence; it’s a pause that says there’s more to come.
Several weeks earlier — before the surgery that cured my first problem but unexpectedly created the spinal cord injury — when I was living with unbearable nerve pain that seemed to have no cure, my friend Jakob called me one afternoon to ask a brave question: “As your friend, I need to ask you: ‘Are you considering taking your own life?’” My answer formed slowly: “No, but I now understand how people get to that point. And if I get there, I promise to call you.”
“Miracles” aren’t limited to the parting of the sea or turning fives loaves and two fishes into a meal for thousands. Sometimes, miracles are smaller, more personal things. Sometimes, miracles involve the healing of relationships. And if there’s one thing I’ve learned as a pastor, it’s that there are a lot of ruptured relationships out there, many of them wrapped up tighter than a Christmas package. A few years ago, a Christmas Eve gathering at our home turned out to be the place of annunciation for one such miracle
