When I Am Weak: An Unexpected Coda

Seeing as we're here again ...

This turned into a 4-part miniseries: part 1, part 2, part 3, and a coda.

I write this very aware of the mere in Mere Immortals.

I’ll spare you the biological details, but in short, a relatively normal medical issue sparked a crisis in my body that put me in the hospital for another few days. A bit of time to normalize me, a bit to investigate and make sure I don’t have any fresh or uncaught issues (the answer is no, thankfully!), and a bit of time to start a phase 2 treatment of my condition. I’ll go home today, and get to celebrate Thanksgiving with my side of my family tomorrow.

On the downside, I look like Tom Hanks at the end of his Cast Away diet. If Halloween were still in the future, I would make me a Wilson.

On the upside, I don’t have any other medical issues that need fixin’ right now, and the phase 2 treatment has given me back lots of energy and made me able to start eating solid foods again, so we can start to Make Joseph Just Skinny Again. Between that and now being on my full dose of my long-term meds, my doctors expect us to be getting the disease into remission in the next few months.

I had a pleasant sense of completion about the three pieces I did before this one; but since this affair has such a clear sense of “unfinished business” and since I’ve had even more time to think, I thought I’d add two more thoughts I’ve been sitting with:

Thanking God for common grace

Christianity is a religion of sheer grace. The whole enchilada: existence itself, the drama of history, our reconciliation to God, our final hope, are all completely the result of God’s undeserved, un-asked-for kindness toward sinners. (And “sinners” includes everyone.)

Salvation is an act of special grace – a unique gift in which God raises a dead soul to life like Jesus raised Lazarus’ four-day-dead corpse. Waking up to see the reality of God and be reconciled to him as his son or daughter is a literal miracle. As Martyn Lloyd-Jones said somewhere, we can make ourselves all kinds of things – Buddhists, atheists, cat people (okay he didn’t say that one) – but only God can make a Christian. There’s a form of grace – special grace, saving grace, that only Christians receive.

But special grace isn’t the only kind of grace. Like Jesus said, “[The Father] makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust” (Matthew 5:45). Common grace is the term for all the ways God stocks this world with blessings instead of letting it slump into evil, decay, and chaos. They’re hints of truth, goodness, beauty, and wisdom that make life livable. These blessings might be lavished on anyone and everyone: non-Christians may seem to get more common grace than Christians do!

But for Christians, common-grace blessings are every bit an occasion for gratitude and worship as much as special grace is. And I’ve been intensely aware of common grace over the last few days, like:

Medicine. Oh man. I don’t know what the prospects for my condition were before this era of medicine, but both Allison and I would be in much worse shape had we lived a century ago. Medical research and scientific knowledge are gifts.

Human kindness. My last hospital stint, I was a person with a disease to be searched for, but a generally able body. This round, I was very much unwell, and painfully aware of the “Brother Ass” indignity of the body. I had several caregivers who were not just doing their job, but incredibly kind and helpful; and in crises like I was in, each one was a godsend.

Shared hardship. In the last week, both Allison and I have met someone who either has the same condition I do, or is related to someone who does. Neither case is identical to mine, but both conversations were encouraging to us, because we were able to hear both how other people have experienced this condition and how both of them are living much more normal lives than when they began. (It does go into remission!)

A functioning body. As the great theologian, hair band Cinderella, asserted, “Don’t know what you got (‘til it’s gone).” When you temporarily lose the ability to stand or to swallow without choking, your baseline for “things I appreciate about my body” sinks to a certain level. In one of the best sermons I’ve ever heard, Tim Keller uses the analogy that we never notice our body parts until they hurt or quit working. In my last piece, I joked about finishing a bowl of oatmeal in half an hour, but eating a solid breakfast and standing up from a chair without help are, in season, worth giving thanks for.

If I had a different worldview, I might see things like these as happenstance; but believing in common grace makes me see them as gifts from the Father. Like Jeremiah Burroughs put it, “[E]very comfort that the saints have in this world is an earnest penny to them of those eternal mercies that the Lord has provided for them.”

Truth is remembered and practiced, not just learned

Last night I was lying awake feeling sorry for myself, when a passage Allison and I had read together last Saturday came back to mind:

Humble yourselves, therefore, under the mighty hand of God so that at the proper time he may exalt you, casting all your anxieties on him, because he cares for you. (1 Peter 5:6-7)

We had talked about how “the mighty hand of God” is shorthand for God’s providence; Peter was encouraging these Christians, who were experiencing persecution for their faith, to accept this hand with humility and trust instead of fear. I had discussed God’s providence a week ago; I had literally written about it days ago. But in the moment, I’d forgotten it and started wallowing.

One of my old pastors used to say, “Our hearts leak.” By that, he meant that we tend to forget what is true, and we need regular reminders to keep ourselves believing the truth and living by the truth. When I was wallowing, I was functionally forgetting God’s providence; I was living as if God’s fatherly hand wasn’t over my life, like I had just written about a week ago! I sprung a leak fast.

Christianity isn’t a one-and-done learning experience. I can say I trust in God’s providence and then forget it in a moment of self-pity. I can theoretically believe God is present with me in hardship, but then practically fume and stew as if I’m all alone.

The Christian life requires perpetually remembering truth. Calling back to mind the things we trust about God, when our circumstances or our moods incline us to forget them. This is part of the value of regularly reading the Bible and having spiritual conversations with other Christians: sure I’ve read Colossians plenty of times, but my leaky heart needs to be filled with it again. I love this honest cry from the author of Lamentations:

Remember my affliction and my wanderings,
    the wormwood and the gall!
 My soul continually remembers it
    and is bowed down within me.
But this I call to mind,
    and therefore I have hope:

The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases;
    his mercies never come to an end;
they are new every morning;
    great is your faithfulness.
 “The Lord is my portion,” says my soul,
    “therefore I will hope in him.” (Lamentations 3:19-24)

But this I call to mind, and therefore I have hope.

The Christian life also requires perpetually practicing truth. What we believe about God, ourselves, and the world should change how we live in the world. If my true hope is in the new creation, it can’t simultaneously be in retiring to a life of maximum comfort. Those beliefs lead to two different ways of living.

I was challenged these last couple of days to live as if I believed the things I know I do believe. I was challenged to lament but not despair; to pray instead of merely worrying; to give thanks in all circumstances instead of wallowing. I have optimism about the days ahead, but I know I’ll have lots more occasions for the same temptations (and plenty of others). And I’m sure I’ll fail in that sometimes, but hopefully these things – plus the help from my wife, family, and community – will keep me remembering and living what is true.

And Lord willing I won’t have occasion to write another of these for a long, long time.