Pain in the neck

“I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith.” –St. Paul, First Century A.D. (2 Timothy 4:7 NIV)
      
I had it all planned when I went back to teaching last fall: I’d teach in the morning and have all afternoon to write and work on my freelance projects. But, as John Lennon once said, “Life is what happens while you’re making other plans.”
      
On the heels of carpal tunnel surgery in December was an inflamed nerve root in my neck. I spent the evening of our thirty-seventh anniversary on the love seat, fighting excruciating pain while Dean unloaded and put away the groceries I’d left in the truck hours earlier, then made supper. Christmas vacation passed in a blur of pain. After a six-day course of a prescription anti-inflammatory medicine, X-rays and an MRI revealed the problem: Of six discs in my neck, four are bad, one of which is herniated. Add to that bone spurs and a pinched nerve.
      
So I come home from teaching, take Tylenol with codeine, then plop on the love seat for the afternoon, barely keeping up with paying the bills and meeting freelance deadlines.
      
In the midst of all this, the doors to speaking and teaching are opening again—after a years-long, dry spell during which I wondered if I was all washed up. When two requests to speak in as many days came, I considered turning one down. But two friends advised me to accept the invitation—and trust God. One—another speaker and writer—chastised me. “How can you even think of turning down something God sends?” she said.
      
But pain has a way of skewing one’s thinking. I had my “thanks but no thanks” email all ready to send.
      
“I can’t drive the pickup all the way to Pittsburgh,” I complained to my husband that evening. “Shifting the gears aggravates the pain.”

“If it’s in the evening, I can drive you,” he suggested.
      
“I doubt it,” I said. “Most of these women’s teas are in the afternoon. It’ll be a two-hour ride one way. My neck just can’t take the bouncing around in that old truck for that long. It just isn’t fair.”
      
He cut short my self-pity tirade with a single question: “Did you think it was going to be easy?”
      
I thought of the apostle Paul, who was beaten, shipwrecked, jailed, stoned and left for dead, flogged, and run out of just about every town he preached in. While gathering firewood after being shipwrecked on an island, he was bitten by a snake. Imagine that! Here he was, being a help, serving, and what does he get for it?
      
I thought of Jesus’ apostles. All but one met a martyr’s death. I thought of all who’ve been persecuted and have died for their faith from the first century to today. And here I was complaining about a pain in my neck.
      
Did you think it was going to be easy?
      
I’d forgotten that when I became a child of God, I acquired a powerful enemy. I’d forgotten that when I stepped up my service to Him, I also stepped up closer to the front lines of the battle that has been waging ever since Lucifer attempted to usurp God’s throne (Isaiah 14:12-15).
      
Did you think it was going to be easy?
      
I’d forgotten that where God calls, He provides. I deleted the “thanks but no thanks” email and sent an acceptance instead. Imagine my surprise (I really shouldn’t have been, though) when I found out that the tea was, indeed, in the evening.
   
      
Forgive me, Lord, for my lack of faith. Help me to be a faithful, worthy soldier. Amen.

Special-Tea: 2 Corinthians 11:23-33

The worst day of my life

You saw me before I was born. Every day of my life was recorded in your book. Every moment was laid out before a single day had passed. –Psalm 139:16 (NLT)
          
“What was the worst day of your life?” one of my students asked me one day last week.
      
I thought for a few moments. What was the worst day of my life? The day I received the phone call that my father was dying? I was a 20-year-old college senior taking 19 credits that semester. When my sister died suddenly at the age of 55? I’d planned to visit her after she recovered from cancer surgery, but a blood clot lodged in her lung and robbed me of the chance to even say goodbye. The day I called my brother, sobbing, and asked him if I could live with him? I was 45 and everything that meant anything to me was slipping away. I wanted to run away from it all and start a new life by myself far, far away.
      
But as bad as those times were, I didn’t feel any of them was the worst day of my life.
      
Then I remembered.
      
“The day my fiancé walked out on me,” I said.
      
I’d just graduated from college and gotten my first job.  He’d helped me move into my apartment. I don’t even remember what he said. But I can still see him driving away, taking my heart, my dreams—my very life—with him.
      
I looked at my students and smiled. “But what I thought was the worst day of my life actually turned out to be the best day of my life.”
      
“How so?” they asked.
      
“Because five months later, I met the real love of my life,” I said, “And I’ve been married to him for 37 years.”
      
Perhaps they saw it as a sweet, happily-ever-after love story. But it’s more. Much more.
      
It’s about a God who knew me before I was born, who had a plan and purpose for my life, which included a man He created just for me—not a perfect man, but perfect for me.
      
Perhaps you’re sorting through the fallout after what you believe was the worst day your life. You’re trying to put the pieces back together, but they’ve changed shape and no longer fit together the way they once did. Wait. Let God do His work His way in His time.  
       
“For I know the plans I have for you,” He tells us in His Word. “They are plans for good and not for disaster, to give you a future and a hope” (Jeremiah 29:11 NLT).
      
      
Dear God, sometimes circumstances force me in a direction I don’t want to go. Remind me that You are the one in control, and that what I think is the worst, in Your hands, may turn out to be the best. Amen.

Special-Tea: Psalm 139:1-18

      
For further thought:
      
Many are the plans in the mind of a man, but it is the purpose of the LORD that will be established. (Proverbs 19:21)
      
The LORD will fulfill his purpose for me. (Psalm 138:8)
      
And we know that God causes everything to work together for the good of those who love God and are called according to his purpose for them. (Romans 8:28)
      
But this I call to mind, and therefore I have hope: The steadfast love of the LORD never ceases, his mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning. (Lamentations 3:21-23)
      

My prayer chair

Draw near to God and He will draw near to you. -- James 4:8 (NJKV)

As with every New Year, I started 2011 with a list of things I want to accomplish. But of all the goals, one takes precedence: to keep my daily appointment with God, reading His Word and talking with Him in prayer.
     
During the last two months of 2010 my quiet time was usurped first by NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month), then by weariness. Instead of getting up each morning and heading to my prayer chair, cup of tea in hand, I headed for my computer to tap out my word count for the day. I’d wanted to write 50,000 words in my historical novel, but I petered out mid-month at 16,308. I’m not sure what happened—a flare-up of my carpal tunnel syndrome, the holidays, the inflamed nerve root in my neck, fatigue, discouragement, all of the above—but by December 31, I felt far from God. And I knew that He hadn’t moved (Hebrews 13:5).
     
I’d come to the place where the psalmist cried out, “As the deer longs for streams of water, so I long for You, O God” (Psalm 42:1NLT).
     
So since Jan. 1, I’ve been following a “Read the Bible in One Year” schedule, reading one chapter a day in the New Testament and two to three in the Old Testament. I’ve been keeping a SOAP (Scripture, Observation, Application, Prayer) journal, writing down a Scripture verse to meditate on, noting my observations (what it says) and how it applies to me, and scripting a brief prayer. I read the New Testament chapter in the morning before work and the Old Testament reading when I come home.
     
It helps that I work half days. It also helps that by the time I come home, the pain caused by the inflamed nerve root in my neck drives me to the love seat for the rest of the afternoon. What better way to spend that “be still” time than to “be still and know that He is God” (Psalm 46:10)? The stillness allows both body and soul to heal.
     
On Jan. 2, I noted Genesis 6:8,9 in my SOAP Journal: “But Noah found grace [favor] in the eyes of the Lord . . . Noah was a just and righteous man, blameless in his [evil] generation; Noah walked [in habitual fellowship] with God” (Amplified).

I saw a connection: Noah found favor with God because he made a habit of spending time with Him. He made fellowship with God a priority, which helped him to become righteous and blameless even though the world around him was rampant with evil.
     
We, too, live in a time when evil is rampant. How important is your prayer chair?
    
O God, You are my God; Early will I seek You; My souls thirsts for You; My flesh longs for You In a dry and weary land where there is no water” (Psalm 61:1 NKJV).
       

Special-Tea: Read Genesis 6:8,9

No quick fix

Forgetting those things which are behind and reaching forward to those things which are ahead, I press toward the goal . . .  – Philippians 3:13?14 NKJV)
    
My body, at 59, is like an old car: Get one thing fixed, and something else breaks.
     
Carpal tunnel surgery last month fixed a pinched nerve in my wrist, but an inflamed nerve root in my neck has me spending my afternoons dealing with pain. I teach in the mornings, and my afternoons are supposed to be for writing, not sitting in the recliner with ice on the back of my shoulders and neck, waiting for the Tylenol with codeine to take effect.
     
After my doctor, whose has a “wait and see” approach, advised me to take ibuprophen for two weeks to reduce the inflammation, I researched the condition online. It’s sciatica of the upper body, in particular, the neck, shoulder, and arm—wherever the nerve pathway goes, there’s pain. And there’s no quick fix. “If nerve inflammation is reduced and irritating movements and positions are avoided,” one site told me, “you should expect slow, steady recovery in 6-8 weeks.”
     
Six to eight weeks? My max for putting up with being sick or injured is three.
     
I spent most of Christmas vacation in a recliner with an ice gel pack on my upper back and neck to calm down the screaming nerve. There’s no pain if I’m just sitting. But vacations end, and real life resumes. Pain or no pain, I’ve a job, a house, a husband—in short, responsibilities. I have to find ways to tend to my duties without making my condition worse. I’ve got to work my way through the pain.
     
Just like life. We’d prefer to stay on the recliner, avoiding the pain that living in this world brings. But we can’t avoid it. And sometimes there are no quick fixes. We have no choice but to work our way through the pain, the setbacks, the slow progress, careful not to make matters worse. Sometimes life changes and we can never go back to where and what we were before.
     
In his book, 90 Minutes in Heaven, Don Piper describes the traffic accident that changed his life, forcing him to deal with constant, chronic pain.
     
“Some things happen to us from which we never recover, and they disrupt the normalcy of our lives,” he writes. “That’s how life is. Human nature has a tendency to reconstruct old ways and pick up where we left off. If we’re wise, we won’t continue to go back to the way things were (we can’t anyway). We must instead forget the old standard and accept a ‘new normal.’”
     
I once read a prayer that addresses normalcy. Although I’ve lost the written words, I still remember the first line: “Normal day, let me be aware of the treasure you are. Let me learn from you, savor you . . .”
     
I’ve forgotten the rest. But it’s a good reminder that life changes. Sometimes things go back to normal. Sometimes we have to learn to accept a new normal.
            
Dear God, thank you for being the one constant in my life. Thank you for Your promise that You will never leave me or forsake me (Hebrews 13:5). Amen.
     

Special-Tea: Read Psalm 139

The backpack

Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. – Matthew 11:28 (NIV)
     
     
I belong to an online prayer group comprised of women in the speaking and writing ministry. After I submitted a prayer request for our monthly day of prayer last month, I received a phone call from one of the members.
     
“Michele, I want to pray with you,” she said.
    
I was surprised and humbled. I didn’t think my request warranted a long distance call from a busy woman who I was sure had better things to do. But what could I say?
     
Afterward, she told me that while we prayed, she had a vision of a backpack that I’d been carrying for a long time. In her vision, Jesus took the backpack from me and put it on Himself. Then He carried it with Him to Calvary, then to the grave. He still had it when He emerged from the tomb, alive on Easter morning, when He opened it. 
     
“Out came all sorts of beautiful things—butterflies, a loaf of bread,” she said. “I don’t know if that means anything to you.”
     
It wasn’t until later that I understood.
     
You see, I do carry a backpack—not a physical backpack but a spiritual one. Every time I feel a sliver of envy, a spark of anger or a flicker of discouragement, and deny it, I add another stone to my backpack. Because the stones are so small—and because I don’t dwell on these negative things—they seem too insignificant to confess to God. But after awhile the stones begin to add up and take up space. Eventually the backpack becomes cumbersome and slows me down. But when I confess the stones of envy, anger and lack of faith, I give them to Jesus, who is waiting to take my load from me.
     
How heavy a backpack I’d been lugging around! It was time to face my failings and relinquish the load.
     
A few days later I emailed my friend: “How can I thank you enough for obeying the nudging of the Holy Spirit and phoning me to pray the other day? I realized after I spoke and prayed with you that I put on such a good face that I don’t realize there are hidden hurts buried deep inside. Unanswered prayers. Disappointments. Discouragement. Instead of taking them to God at the first sign, I shove them into the backpack because at that point they are so small, so light, I don’t think they’re important enough to take to God. And envy. Oh, my. A lot of ugly stuff in that backpack. What a beautiful vision of what Jesus does—takes that backpack crammed with all the ugly stuff that, put all together, is far heavier than I’d realized, and transforms it into something beautiful.”
     
What’s in your backpack? Why not give it to Jesus and start the New Year off unencumbered by the past? Only He can turn your stones into bread.
     
Dear God, help me to throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily weighs me down, and run with perseverance the race that You have marked out for me” (adapted from Hebrews 12:1). Amen.       

     Special-Tea: Matthew 11:28-30