Holding It All Together

  God spoke to my heart recently at church and the message has stayed with me so strongly that I really wanted to share it with you today. I'll wait to post it though so that I can link the sermon, although the song will take longer to be recorded. You see, our worship pastor, Michael, is also a song writer and God has used him to share some beautiful, impactful messages through music. A few weeks back, he shared a new song he had written and it touched my heart. This week, he shared the song again and invited us to sing along, but it spoke to me even more deeply because of the message a guest speaker had given. One of our fellow church members, Bryan, spoke yesterday on John 5:2-9, the story of Jesus healing the man at the pool of Bethesda. He focused on Jesus' words in verse 6, “Do you want to get well?” This may have seemed like a strange question, but there are lots of reasons that someone may not want to get well. Illness may be all they've ever known. This man may have been lame his entire life and lived off the generosity of others and the church. If he was healed, he would have no skills, no training to support himself. As miserable as it might be, it was what he was used to and change is scary and hard. I grew up on a prison island in the Puget Sound (my dad was a guard there) and I remember a story about a prisoner that just baffled me when I was young and broke my heart when I was old enough to better understand. He had served his time and was released. He rode the boat over to the mainland, walked down the dock, saw the nearest convenience store in which he promptly stole a 6-pack of beer and sat on the corner, drinking it, waiting to be picked up and taken back to jail. You see, he only knew one way of life. He knew one routine, one set of expectations. In prison he had family, he had skills, he had value. On the outside, he was just an ex-con that no one would want to hire and who would struggle for every morsel he put into his mouth. So he did the only thing he knew to do, causing the least harm to anyone he could, and went back to his life. Now I am not glorifying prison anymore than I am glorifying chronic illness. They are both terrible, miserable life sentences, but sometimes the devil you know is better than the devil you don't as they say. 

 Answering that question truthfully may take me the rest of my life, but there was another message that was spoken to my heart yesterday. It was prepared by the sermon and brought home by the song Michael led us in after. The lyrics in the verses made me think, caused me to step out of automatic worship mode and truly consider my relationship with God, but I can't remember the verses well enough to share them here today. What I do remember, is the chorus:

It's You-ooooo, Holding me together, You're holding me together

 As I've mentioned before, I have a connective tissue disorder called Ehlers-Danlos Syndromes. My body's collagen is defective, and collagen makes up a significant percentage of a body's structure, from tendons and ligaments to fascia and even bones and organs. My joints are quite lax because of this and they tend to hyperextend, often leading to sprains and tears, of which I have had MANY. In fact, several of these sprains have become permanent because the over-stretched ligaments were never able to return to their original structure, leading to perpetually unstable joints and a fair amount of pain. I have a high sprain in my left ankle, a lateral sprain in my right ankle, as well as sprains in my SI joint, and my T5-6 and T11-12 joints of my spine that are like this. The T11-12 one is my most unusual as the PT that diagnosed it, who does spinal assessments for hypermobile people just about every day, had never seen one at that joint before. So how do I function in life with all these sprains? Well, I've developed some innate and some intentional adaptations. Intentionally, I frequently use braces (like the one in the picture above on my wrist) to support joints that are "flaring" or evidencing additional laxity either through pain or movement, or both. So, yesterday, when I woke up and my SI joint was clearly out of alignment, on went the SI belt. This is both to add support so that I don't further injure the joint as well as to help with pain. The innate adaptation that my body has developed is less pleasant. Against my will, my body decided that my muscles were stronger than my connective tissues (think tendons and ligaments) so it put my muscles into permanent overdrive to reinforce the lax joints. My physical therapist has said that it felt like I had 3 spines in my back because the para-spinal muscles on either side of my spine were so tight they felt like bone.  

 What does any of this have to do with church yesterday? As I mentioned, the song said that it's GOD holding me together - but I keep trying to do it myself. Whether it's intentionally, through using braces, or innately, because my muscles are overcompensating for my underperforming ligaments, I am trying to hold myself together rather than relying on God to do it. Does this mean that I shouldn't use braces? No, I don't think so. Really, I think that God was using this as more of a metaphor to communicate with me.

 You see, my lax joints aren't the only thing I'm trying to hold together in my life. A while back, I shared about how God opened my eyes to my attempt to hold onto my baby, my firstborn son. I was afraid that if I wasn't watching him, holding him, in constant contact with him, he might not take his next breath. Now, what I would have done if he had stopped breathing I have no idea, but I felt this sense of responsibility for something that, in hindsight, clearly wasn't mine to bear. God showed me this in a few different ways, and helped me to let go of my irrational hold on my son, at least a little. A year later, He gave me the opportunity to start the letting go process with my husband as well as I sent him off on an international trip that I had gotten the idea in my head would be his last. If I had thought at the time that I had learned my lesson, I found quickly that I was sadly mistaken and each of these was only a part one. My children went on to experience bizarre, uncommon, and even rare health conditions that required extensive treatment. When they were older, my watch over them was further tested by instances of one, than another of them running away. Now, not only was their health on the line, which I had foolishly thought I had some hand in, but I had no way of knowing anything about how they were, if they were safe, how to "fix things." But by far, the worst way I've experienced my inability to control or keep my loved ones safe was through the specter of suicidal ideation. That is certainly the most terrifying situation I've faced in life, and the one that has shown me how little I can personally do and how much I MUST rely on God. 

 When faced with a situation that is completely out of my control, like a brain tumor or a loved one that is struggling with suicidal tendencies, my default is to try to do something - like putting on a brace. But what I believe God is showing me today is that the something I should be doing is trusting Him. When faced with worry or concern, I need to lay it at His feet. The thing I can do is to pray. Pray for my loved ones, pray for myself, pray for the doctors and technicians that are helping, just pray. Except it's not a just it's everything. It's the only thing I can do that will have any real effect. Does praying mean that nothing bad will happen? No, and that's the hardest part of all of this for me. God never promises us that bad things will not happen. Quite the opposite in fact, He promises that hard things will come in this life. In John 16:33, Jesus tells us that in this world we will have trouble. But He then goes on to say, "But take heart! I have overcome the world."

Here's the Thing: The troubles of this world are real, but they are temporary. We've looked at some of the ways that God uses these troubles for good, but I truly believe that we cannot begin to fully grasp all that God has planned. I'm impressed and drawn to the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) because of the many ways that they have crossed over from one story line to another, bringing things together in these epic, incredible mashups of different characters and different universes, but this doesn't even come close to the complexity of the crossovers that God has going on. Newton's third law of motion teaches us that, "Every action has an equal and opposite reaction" and God knows exactly how each and every one of our actions will echo and reverberate across time and space, bumping into everyone else's actions, causing new reverberations. The concept is inconceivable, truly, but the idea of it is what shows me how little influence I truly have, and how incredible God's perfect influence is. I'm so grateful I can trust Him completely and let go of trying to hold it all together!

If you'd like to watch the sermon for yourself, here it is: