That moment when …

My friends in our fantasy baseball league have been emailing me lately, offering to trade me their prospects and rookie players who might be good in the future for my established players who are good right now.  It’s a common practice in the league – the players who are losing this year dump their good players in exchange for players that might help them win next year.  Because it’s too late now, so better get a head start on next year. 

I am not ready for those offers.  I am not ready to admit that I cannot, or will not, win this year. 

That doesn’t really matter of course.  I’m going to lose, whether I’m ready for it or not. 

That’s how life is.  Bad news comes in its own time.  It does not wait for you to be ready, it does not seek permission or show concern for  circumstances.  It is because it is, and the only choice (which is really not the right word for it) is whether to deal with its reality or be trampled in denial.

Such has been the other, recent journey in my life.

Seven years ago I was diagnosed with a rare auto-immune disorder that causes arthritis.  In most cases, it resolves in a few months.  Not so for me.  But to my good fortune, working through a series of medications my doctor and I have found a way to manage it pretty effectively.  Now it is just an odd aspect of my life, like a strange personality quirk that shows itself sporadically lest I forget and slight its existence.  Mostly it is a story I tell people about myself, an opening unto familiarity with the struggles of the people around me.

And then two years ago something changed.  New pains and problems occurred that I had not previously known.  Old medicines did not regain the upper hand.  Tests revealed strange and different issues that did not submit so easily, new diagnosis piled up, one on the other, accumulating and growing, into a truth that can no longer be ignored or denied.

I have multiple sclerosis. 

Even as I write the words, they seem unreal.  I know what it is, I have known and watched people face it in their own lives.  But this disease, like so many bad things I know about, happens to other people and not to me.  It is as if I have traveled this journey in a disembodied state, reading the reports and listening to the doctors speaking about someone else.  I am fine, these symptoms are transient, this problem will pass as it always has before. 

I am not ready to admit that I am sick. 

But that doesn’t matter either. 

It turns out that diseases, like so much of life, happen in their own time.  They do not seek wait for us to be ready or ask permission nor are they concerned with circumstances.  They are because they are.  They will not be dismissed or forgotten of simply managed into oblivion.  They are a fact, one that demands attention.  One that demands faith.

As a person in the faith business, I am not unaware of this particular trial. 

So here at its onset, I have decided (naively, I confess) to welcome it.

There is a great gift of clarity in this moment.  As a student of philosophy and theology, as a preacher striving to put great truths into words and who is rarely without them, I find myself strangely empty-handed.  I cannot explain why this has happened to me.  Whatever this moment is, it comes from without, elsewhere.  I did not choose this (and who would!), I did not plan for it, but it has chosen me.  All of my pretensions and expectations have been stripped away and I am alone, misdirected toward a unforeseen future.  I am merely and completely called to live in this peculiar dimension and make of it what I best can.

This is what it is.  That is its truth. 

Not unlike the One who also is what He is. 

I am finding myself caught up in this stark moment of faith, where works and will are swept aside and all that remains is unprotected, vulnerable in his presence.  It turns out to be far too easy to clothe ourselves in what we think we are, what we think we should be, in assorted poses and affectations.  In our selves.  Yet we are called into existence by a word preached as crucifixion, the stripping down of us, so that we might stand in the presence of He Who Is with nothing.  Nothing at all.  So that we can stop defining ourselves and instead be defined as he has defined us to be. 

So I will, as best I can, try first to just live here, to be carried through the process, to allow this moment to be, to subsume my own will to whatever is at work on me, in me.  To be participant in life, and not its god.  That will, I know change.  I know I will at times fall into that singular viewpoint that we all name existence, and miss out on the reality of life as it passes me by. 

And in those moments I pray faith will come. 

Faith is our first disease.  These other sicknesses are, finally, figments, shadows, phantoms of a world that we have already died to.  We have been infected in baptism by a much different spirit, and though we have tried to treat it with religion and self-righteousness and judgment, it remains and grows, symptom by symptom, often painful and disabling but ever persistent and defining. 

No, we are not ready to admit that we have been saved. 

But that doesn’t matter either.