letters to _______, no. 03

Dear _________,

Do you ever feel so alone you feel invisible? I don't understand why you and I have to suffer. I don't understand why there are millions of people in this world, many people in my life, and as the prayer requests went around at my women's small group the other night, many people in each of lives living with physical ailments.

I don't understand why there has to be pain. Disease. Sickness and death in this world.

It's something I know theologically and in my head, but an issue I struggle to reconcile with all that is within my heart.

I don't know why you and I have to suffer. Why we have to live with ongoing health conditions that despite our ever living hour and fight to place this thing in its cage and not let it rule or control our lives, its burden is like hiking uphill with lead in our boots and bowling balls in our backpacks.

Our lives and our bodies breaking beneath its weight.

I wish I could take your pain away. And you mine. I wish prayers and the advancement of medicine, and the love and support of friends and people who long to see us made well could make it all better, take our suffering away.

I dream of waking up and everything being normal. I found myself waking up to that dream even yet again just this evening. A dream that came crashing down as I reconginzed that first piercing pain in my legs.

Reminding me this is far from over, I am not yet home.

Tonight, I'm praying for you and for me. For though we feel invisible, helpless and utterly alone at times, our suffering and our pain is not invisible to God. He sees and knows and grieves with us. Even though just writing that last sentence I am reminded of a question that resurfaced Thursday in some of the greatest physical pain I've been in in a long time. If He can do something, why won't He. Why hasn't He. If He can take it away, why hasn't He yet.

These were questions I wasn't even entirely sure I wanted answers to, yet questions that surfaced and just needed to be admitted for what they were. Cries from a heart that is broken, a pain emanating from a place deep within.

A place that knows in her heart as well as her head that she is loved, that she has done nothing to deserve this, yet a place that still wonders even still, but am I, but what have I done to deserve this.

I don't know why you and I have to suffer.

I don't know why life as we knew it got ripped out from underneath us like this, I don't understand or know why it has to be like this.

But as much as I don't want to say this, I know it will all make sense one day.
Hold on.

And don't be afraid to ask the questions on your heart.
For they are there for a reason and often the questions themselves become the answers we're longing for. Oftentimes, those questions begin to be the very thing that lifts, heals our broken hearts.

Hold on.

Our victory, our help, our relief is coming.
One day, one question, one heartbreak, one victory at a time.