Love, Chronic Pain, and Toothpaste

I wrote another essay for my church’s eNewsletter. You may recognize some bits and pieces of it from two previous posts. As always, what I ended up writing is not necessarily what I sat down to write. That is the amazing thing about the writing process. I truly feel the Spirit working through me. I am blessed and honored to have a venue in which to share this writing.

Love, Chronic Pain, and Toothpaste

“A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.” (John 3:34-35 NIV)
I have fibromyalgia. This is a fancy-schmancy medical-ese way of saying that on any given day, I hurt all over. Sometimes a lot, sometimes a little, but every day I’m in some sort of pain. It is mainly concentrated around my hips, but spreads throughout my entire body and is frequently accompanied by overwhelming fatigue. One current theory is that although FM is not necessarily caused by a traumatic injury or motor vehicle accident, such events can bring out FM. I was in a serious car accident in 1991. The lap belt saved my life, but did lifelong tissue damage and since then I have been in pain every day.
I am in the midst of deep processing about how much this chronic pain affects my life. For years, I would just push on through and catch up on the weekends by sleeping constantly. I convinced myself I had no life because I was a teacher, and teachers’ work never ends (poor me). I told myself I was overwhelmed because starting up a new church was Hard Work, and I had to do so much to make myself feel valuable. I would snap at my husband, screaming under the weight of everything I had to do.
The reality was that I was pushing my body to the limit and beyond each and every day. Instead of feeling these limitations, embracing them, and learning from them, I continued to destroy my body and relationships by living in denial and lashing out at myself and those closest to me. I was screaming under the weight of trying to appear perfect and therefore prove there was nothing wrong with me (or with my faith).
Somehow I bought into the idea that I had to appear to have it all together in order to show (prove?) my faith. I thought the only way I had value to anyone was to be perfect.
But Jesus doesn’t say “You’ll show everyone how great I am by how great and put-together YOU are.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 3rd, 2007 at 12:36 PM and is filed under Essays, Faith, Journey. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.