Finding purpose inside of pain
By Colleen Peters
August 18, 2016
For the last twelve years I’ve lived with MS and have long struggled with giving an answer when people ask how I’m doing. It’s a difficult question for me because there are many facets to the answer.
Several years ago, to alleviate my frustration, I tried to explain in a letter what it was like to be in my skin and how my illness affected our family of six. I continued to write letters several times a year and they became the backbone of my recently published book, Endearing Pain: Life Lessons from MS Afflictions.
Life lessons
In November 2004 I underwent brain surgery as doctors tried to diagnose a large foreign body in my brain. Some neurological anomalies I was experiencing had precipitated a CAT scan and MRI, both showing an abnormality impossible for doctors to to diagnose without tissue.
A biopsy was scheduled and two days before the surgery, as Len our kids and I were decorating our Christmas tree, I got an unexpected phone call from the neurosurgeon. I’ll never forget the glaring incongruity during those minutes when in one room I heard him tell me the statistical percentages of brain damage or death resulting from a brain biopsy, while at the same time hearing from the next room the happy noises made by Len and the kids as they finished decorating our tree. I had good reason to fear it would be my last Christmas with them.
Several weeks earlier I’d heard about a friend’s sister-in-law dying from a brain tumour discovered only months before her death. ‘Was that sobering news an omen of sorts?’ was one of my first thoughts when the ER physician explained to me after he’d evaluated the CAT scan that a brain tumour could not be ruled out.
Days of waiting stretched into weeks and my fear was ferocious, fuelled as it was by what I felt might be a possible portent of a brain tumour. Yet, beneath it all was a peculiar peace that quelled the fear.
Lessons in the waiting
Though at the time I sensed no purpose in the waiting, I’ve come to appreciate that dark time as an expression of God’s loving purposes for me—a time when my tired faith was validated and then infused with a fresh vitality. Deep inside I knew that God was in control of my chaos and that I was loved.
The months of waiting finally came to an end in mid-February when I was given news of no malignancy, and a referral to the MS cinic. This brought resounding relief. I knew next to nothing about MS but I’d heard plenty about cancer as my Dad’s side of the family is riddled with it.
I felt I’d been given a new lease on life. At that point all I knew about MS was that many Manitobans had the disease, and so I assumed there would be plenty of information and support available to me.
But given the unusual type of lesions found in my brain, the definitive diagnosis of MS was still 18 months, two more MRI’s, and a spinal tap away. The labelling of the specific type of MS I have (progressive relapsing MS) was many more months in coming, following a trip to the mayo clinic.
With that label came the discovery that there was very little information to be had about this rare type of MS. But as God rescued me from crisis fear in 2004, so he has been equally gracious with the subsequent chronic fears I’ve faced as I’ve learned to live with a disease marked by progressive deterioration that has brought much change into my life.
Learning to embrace suffering
Though the changes have been arduous in many ways, they have also been channels of God’s grace and Christ has come again and again to drive away fear and put wind in my sails.
It’s hard to say exactly how the events of 2004 affected me, but I do know that God mercifully met me at crucial times in creative ways, and so impressed his love upon my heart and mind that I couldn’t help but love him with new abandon and was compelled to tell of it.
Shortly after I became ill I read some words of Henri Nouwen’s that challenged me to not just endure, but to embrace whatever suffering and losses might be waiting for me, words that fortified my resolve to do that as well as I could.
“Every time there are losses there are choices to be made. You choose to live your losses as passages to anger, blame, hatred, depression and resentment, or you choose to let these losses be passages to something new, something wider, and deeper.“
I sensed the strong truth in those words and it galvanized me to live my MS losses as passages to something new, something wider, and deeper. God honoured my determination to do so, and brought to my life a depth I’d not known previous to the arrival of MS.
As I’ve wrestled with thoughts of God’s will and my will, and how the two might meet, words of Frederick Buechner’s have been a boon for me.
“As I see it, in other words, God acts in history and in your and my brief histories not as the puppeteer who sets the scene and works the strings but rather as the great director who no matter what role fate casts us in conveys to us somehow from the wings, if we have our eyes, ears, hearts open and sometimes even if we don’t, how we can play those roles in a way to enrich and ennoble and hallow the whole vast drama of things including our own small but crucial parts in it.” *
My hope is that I will continually submit to His directorship, take my cues from Him, and play my small but crucial part well. And, thanks be to God that even when I lose sight of Him, He never loses sight of me.
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*Connor, Listening to Your Life, 323
