Health wobble and learning about grace

About a month ago I had what I've come to call a 'health wobble'. I was running on my usual route, when I begun to feel a cramp developing. This usually happens when I'm on the eve of or have just started on my period, and sometimes gets so bad I have to stop and walk for a bit until it abates before I can continue running. It didn't feel too bad, and I was only about a kilometre away from my turning point so I tried to keep going.

Soon, however, the pain was undeniable. It's hard to describe this pain - it kind of reaches up to you heart and makes you feel anxious, and reaches down to your legs and make them feel cold and weak. It makes you feel nauseous. It is not the sometimes friendly pain of effort or intensity (e.g. post hill sprints), but the sort of pain that makes you feel like something is wrong and you don't know how to fix it. 

I wasn't able to walk the pain off, so I ended up crouching, then sitting. One of the people who I walk past and who waves to me (I wave back - it is very pleasant to have a anonymous group of friendly faces on a morning run) stopped and asked if I was alright, and stayed with me, talking to distract me and to accompany me until Dad and Hannah could come. We tried walking a few times, but sometimes his voice would start fading and the edges of my vision would start blurring so eventually I just stayed sitting with my head between my legs. Dad drove me home and I spent the rest of the day resting. 

The feelings that came out of that episode were strange to reflect on. On one hand, I felt rather unhappy - that I hadn't completed the run, that I was betrayed by my own body, that I had some sort of perceived weakness which I couldn't 'cure'. On the other hand, the physical fatigue and its evident manifestation in real life made me feel justified in taking a rest that day and only doing very light work. Usually, if I feel inexplicably tired I find it hard to give myself a rest, particularly when I can't see the problem or justify the tiredness. 

This physical health wobble, combined with increased responsibility at work which had been making me feel incapable and inexperienced, made for a difficult week. Friends counselled me with wise words I often offer to others myself: 'Have grace for yourself.' But I've realised that, while the core of my belief system is that I have been given abundant grace by the creator of the universe, I find it incredibly hard to claim that grace for myself. It's as if God offers me the grace I so crave and I say in return, 'Oh, but wait. Let me make myself worthy. Let me prove myself.' Which, of course, works the wrong way round. Grace gives me the platform of security and encouragement that allows me to grow into the person I was made to be. 

Just before that health wobble, my lovely friend Naomi wrote an article about experiencing 'chronic not-wellness' on her blog. Her words had so much wisdom, and say what I'd like to say with beauty and sensitivity, so I have put them here (read the whole article here):

Scripture teaches us that we don’t have bodies, we are bodies. It was just such a body, beautiful and limited and strong and fragile, that God himself decided was good enough for him. It is just such a body that the Holy Spirit declares a temple, holy, sacred. You cannot abuse that body without consequences. Chronic Not-Wellness at many times has functioned like a warning shot, an unavoidable reminder of the thoughtless way I was treating my body. Slowly, I came to rely on its communication, my illness weirdly functioning to make me more whole.

I am gradually realising that the people I admire and want to emulate are the ones who I perceive to be most ‘useful’ in the world, in my own flawed and prejudiced judgement of what constitutes usefulness – most gifted, most productive, most charismatic. Sometimes those things disguise themselves under other words: most sacrificial, most servant-hearted, most faithful, most committed. 

Except that I worship a man who lived in total obscurity for thirty years, worked an unremarkable job as a manual labourer, had a brief, local ministry in a remote part of the Middle East and was finally killed for his pains. Much about Jesus’ life baffles my capitalist work ethic: why didn’t he get going sooner? Why did he try to keep his identity secret for a significant portion of his ministry? Why did he let himself be stopped so quickly? There were so many more people to heal, feed, teach – so much opportunity for usefulness. Hanging on a cross is not useful. Why did Jesus throw away his highly promising career? Sacrifice effectiveness for the sake of total, naked vulnerability?

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Chronic Not-Wellness reminds me that as long as I believe, in my secret heart, that life is about getting as much done as possible and that anything that stops me doing things is an evil, I will be blind to what has already been done for me. I will act with impatience, not gratitude and wonder, towards what I perceive to be slow or unproductive. I will be perpetually dissatisfied with what I have and what I have achieved. And I will fail to understand Jesus Christ, who declares that it is not healthy people who need a doctor, but the sick; not the whole who he came to save, but the broken. I will fail to understand the terrible, powerful truth contained by Paul’s words that Christ’s strength works most powerfully in my weakness (2 Cor 12:9), because it is then that it is all about him.