Much to Learn

The following weeks flew by in a blur of hollow sadness. The days fell into one another, feeling as if it had been one terribly long day. One terribly long bad dream. Losing him in this way with no real promise of improvement was almost unbearable. While he had admitted himself, we knew that he would not be able to leave on his own terms. Discharge from the psychiatric hospital would be in the hands of his doctors. And that was terrifying. What if they chose to keep him? What if his doctors didn’t like him and begrudgingly kept him locked up? The very idea of him being kept in a locked facility was both shattering and enraging. I knew he was stronger. They didn’t know him like we did. I wanted to yell at his doctors to release him. Having never met them, I secretly hated them for doing this to him, knowing it was illogical given his self-admission.

But it just felt better to be mad at someone.

Visits weren’t showing any magical improvement. I had pictured extensive counseling sessions and one-on-one therapy to be regularly occurring as an inpatient. That was not the case. Instead, his meds were rapidly being adjusted in a safe place where he could be monitored, particularly through bloodwork. It didn’t seem like enough. His personality was still flat. He didn’t laugh like he used to. Adjusting his meds only added to it all in my opinion. Was the psych ward really just glorified adult babysitting? He hadn’t been a threat to himself or anyone else. So what was this all for?

As the days passed, I became discouraged, realizing his care was not what I hoped it to be. I wanted him to be in a therapeutic and healing environment, free of stress and worry, encouraging him toward acceptance and true healing. Maybe I was being unrealistic. Maybe that place didn’t exist. But this just didn’t feel like enough for my dad.

He deserved better.

He had been the one to help countless individuals for my whole life. More than once we took in families to live with us for extended periods of time. More than once he gave of his money ‘until it hurt’. He was well acquainted with sacrificing time for others. Giving to others. Encouraging others. So to see him this way. It just felt wrong. Now was his turn to receive. And this wasn’t even close to enough.

After three weeks, he was discharged home. But he wasn’t better yet. The whole thing felt pointless. He wasn’t put back together. While it was reassuring having him home, knowing that professionals had deemed him ‘safe’, I couldn’t help but wonder what we were supposed to do next.

Our relationship had changed from what it once was. Conversations that once flowed were now abrupt and one sided. He simply didn’t’ have much to say. In the past, there were times I would have to fight to get a word in. But now he was quiet. Too quiet. As a result, my eagerness to share with him began to slowly die down. Each time I felt a bit more discouraged. A bit more hurt that he didn’t reciprocate my emotions. My mom told me he couldn’t help it. But at times, I couldn’t help taking it all personally.

And so I retracted. Into myself. Feeling more alone. Wondering who would be my ‘person’? How could God take him from me in that way? After all I had been through. I knew there was a stigma with chronic disease. So few understood my disease, and all that came with it. Even fewer had actually taken the time to research and learn about it. Many times I had been let down by others, not understanding my struggle. Now to add this? There was even more of a stigma with mental illness. I knew fewer, still, would understand this. Many would run and hide. Causing me to go deeper into my depth of darkness.

And so, I circled on my wheel of confusion.

Into the darkest time of my life.

Never had I known so much pain. So much loss.

And I had had enough.

I felt that God’s way was no longer working. I grew tired of waiting around for him. He didn’t comfort me like I thought he would or should. And he certainly wasn’t making anything better.

I had much to learn.

I didn’t know I could trust God and experience great sorrow. I didn’t know I could pray and pray and still remain in darkness. For a very long time. Or maybe I didn’t want to know.

More, I didn’t know I could be truly honest with him about how I felt. How I felt he was being unfair. I was accustomed to neat prayers full of thanksgiving and reverence. But that just wasn’t my life anymore.

Jeremiah 15:18 says, “Why is my pain unending and my wound grievous and incurable? You are to me like a deceptive brook, like a spring that fails.”

I didn’t know it then. But he was trustable. Even in pain. But I couldn’t see past my pain. Past the mess that had become my life. Past the devastating way my expectations for my life had been so vigorously wiped out. All I saw was my pain.

But he was there.

Isaiah 42:3 says, “A bruised reed he will not break, and a smoldering wick he will not snuff out until in faithfulness he brings forth justice”.

Keller, in Walking with God through Pain and Suffering, points out, “The Hebrew word translated as “bruise” does not mean a minor injury. It denotes a deep contusion that destroys a vital internal organ- in other words, a deathblow”.

That was a word I could relate to. Deathblow.

Sure, I had read the book of Job and heard of others who had suffered many terrible and frightening things.

I just simply couldn’t believe God would allow me to be one of them.

I had much to learn.

Oh, to have considered the beautiful words of Lamentations 3:

“I remember my affliction and my wandering, the bitterness and the gall. I well remember them, and my soul is downcast within me. Yet this I call to mind and therefore I have hope: Because of the Lord’s great love we are not consumed, for his compassions never fail. They are new every morning; great is your faithfulness…The Lord is good to those whose hope is in him; it is good to wait quietly for the salvation of the Lord...Let him sit alone in silence, for the Lord as laid it one him…For men are not cast off by the Lord forever. Though he brings grief, he will show compassion, so great is his unfailing love.” (v. 22, 23, 26, 28, 31, 32)

Though he brings grief, he will show compassion.

So great is his unfailing love.

Laura Mixon sings a popular song, “What if the trials of this life are your mercies in disguise”?

What a beautiful perspective. Our trials as his mercies.

But how?

What if everything I had endured were not of God’s abandoning of me but instead were his mercies?

His drawing me in.

His loving me the best way he possibly could beyond what I could see or understand.

To create something beautiful.

Something eternal.

Something beyond what I could ever possibly dream for myself.

He had never promised an easy road.

Though my skewed image of love told me that if my God loved me he would deliver me from all pain and seemingly unending misery.

But he had been painting on the canvas of my life the whole time without me realizing.

I only saw the mess, the scattered paint.

It didn’t make sense.

It was ugly up close.

There was no reason or rhyme to it.

 I couldn’t understand.

Mine didn’t look like the others.

Mine wasn’t pretty and fixed up just right.

Mine was messy and hard.

There were scars.

But the painter knew what he was doing.

And as he continued his work, just like that of a Monet painting, something beautiful was forming.

One glance at a small square of present circumstances may appear messy and nonsensical, but the painter knew the outcome of the story.

The outcome of his masterpiece.

The final look at the whole picture.

I knew I couldn’t see the whole picture.

And in my confusion, not only did I not see the whole picture, I also decidedly lost sight of the painter.

Leading myself down an unnecessary road that would ultimately lead to great disappointment and heartache.

I had much to learn.