What This Illness Creates

Bare shelves. 

You can see them right now in your mind, can't you? They were on that Facebook post that friend of your friend posted. 

Long lines. You stood in one at Target, maybe talking with someone next to you about the absurd situation we all find ourselves in. 

Empty calendar. Concerts, school plays, and rehearsals and church services. All of this feeding a sense of anxiety and relief. It takes a while to stop. Even when the brakes get slammed.

This is what illness always does. It causes a stop. We know it on it on an individual level, but we forgot we were part of a more extensive system. A larger body. 

Whenever I get sick, I think, "Gah! I don't have time for this!!" 

I think I hate being sick, not so much because it's painful or uncomfortable, I hate it because it's inconvenient. I hate to stop.

But this is one of the givens of life on this planet. Our bodies must stop. 

I've heard some writers propose the idea that illness is our body's way of forcing us to take a sabbath. 

It seems that of all the values God cares about, rest may be right up there with loving your neighbor.

Important enough to be explicitly modeled from the beginning of creation. Rest and limits.

It's remarkable how quickly our bodies break down without rest. According to John Hopkins University, People who are deprived of sleep are 3x more likely to catch a cold. Lack of rest ages your brain by three to five years and make it 48% more likely to develop heart disease. That's just talking about sleep, which is only one part of rest.

Rest in the Bible is all about preserving a relationship. The first purpose is to preserve the relationship we have with the community. Rest allows for equality and justice. It makes sure everyone has enough. Rest is also about preserving and cultivating the life of one's own soul and connection to God. When sabbath rest is not protected and honored, it quickly spreads into symptoms of injustice, poverty, power-grabbing, and war. 

I know I'm stepping into tricky territory. So I just want to acknowledge that I don't know what to make of this viral outbreak. It might not mean anything spiritual. If it does have spiritual significance, I don't believe it's God's way of punishing us for our sins. (Shocker: I don't think God punishes us for sin. Sin punishes sin. We've got plenty of ways to punish ourselves.) The spiritual meaning of this whole thing for me is that a virus cannot be evil. It has no malice or power agenda. It's a natural organism that is encoded with the ability to live. Its power to live at the moment is more robust than other viruses we have seen before. So God's invitation to me is to stop and listen and wait. That is what this all boils down to for me. 

I'm recognizing now that I am in the denial stage of grief. My trusted mental models aren't matching reality. My go-to strategy of increasing effort using the same methods that have worked in the past has been thwarted. When I'm finally forced to rest, the shame and anxiety I've been running from catch up. Shame that I'm not mature enough to integrate rest into my life and anxiety that if I stop, I might be left behind somehow. Then I remember that this is the normal cycle of the season of Lent, of which we are in. This is the time when we give space to wrestle with fear, doubt, and shame. I don't want to be shut in a house with these guys, but from time to time, God knows that I need to be to see that I don't need to be afraid or run from them. They are alerting me to pieces of myself that need my attention. They are indicators that there is some part of myself that I've exiled and needs to be reintegrated. 

This is the hidden gift of illness; it creates an opportunity for healing. 

Death creates a door for resurrection.

I'll leave you with the last two stanzas of my favorite poem. Naomi Shihab Nye says what I'm trying to say, much better than I can. If you are in a place where you can say these words out loud and hear the gift of your own voice, I highly recommend that!

Before you know kindness as the most profound thing inside, 

you must know sorrow as the other most profound thing. 

You must wake up with sorrow.

You must speak to it till your voice

catches the thread of all sorrows,

and you see the size of the cloth. 

Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,

only kindness that ties your shoes

and sends you out into the day to mail letters and 

purchase bread,

only kindness that raises its head

from the crowd of the world to say

it is I you have been looking for,

and then goes with you everywhere

like a shadow or a friend.