I wish
In the garage, on the way in at the end of a bruised up day, Riley has another seizure. Kevin, coming around the other side of the car, sees her stop, notices her sudden silence. He calls her name, and she turns her head but can’t answer. Stuck, her head bobs, like something sinister has her by the throat. She makes strangled sounds. It’s seconds, just long enough to rip up another part of our hearts. Kevin makes it to her just as her body begins to fall backward, just in time to keep her whole. And then, just as quickly, she returns to us.
Brokenness shows up first in the little things: Her bookbag sits neglected, in the wrong place. I come downstairs, and she works her way through a ritual I’ve seen a thousand times, only this time she sits instead of stands. I sit down beside her, put my hand on her back. “Hi,” I say simply. I’ve learned that some questions–Are you okay?–are too open ended; they cause her anxiety where I mean none. She wonders, Am I okay? Should I be? She wonders if it’s okay not to be okay, and I want her to know that it is, because sometimes we’re just not.
“Mom Jones?” She says. She calls us Jones, it’s the remnant of an old joke turned into a sign of affection, a bit of her eccentricity that assures us all she’s still herself. Once, one of these seizures stole that right away and she couldn’t remember our names at all. Blankly she blinked. Minutes ticked away without the silly things we wished she’d say, and finally, when she could identify us, she repeated our full names in a stiff robotic voice we couldn’t recognize. That time, it took fifteen minutes for her to come back; fifteen long, slicing minutes until finally we were the Joneses again. So today, I take the gift, I treasure it. “Did Dad Jones tell you I had a seizure in the garage?”
“No, not yet. You did?”
“Yea. Mom Jones?”
“Yes?”
“I wish I didn’t have seizures.”
“I know. Me too,” I say, rubbing her back, saving inquiry for later.
Zoe sits on the couch, ice packs strapped to her knees; she groans, offering me a grimace. “I wish my knees didn’t hurt,” she says. We have no idea what she’s done. She’s that kid in our family who manages to break her body routinely, just by living. A few days in the gym, and now she’s nursing her knees.
“How do you do this stuff to yourself?” I ask, but the smile on my face carries over into my voice, and she grins, acknowledging her own propensity for injury.
“I don’t know, but I wish I could exercise and not get hurt.”
I wish. Those two words give shape to our groaning, all this wrestling with pain that’s part of living while we wait for glory. I think of my friend who lost her husband just days ago, how she sat at our friend’s table with tears soaking her cheeks, how she said, “I know he had to go. He was so miserable. But I wish he could have gotten well. I wish we had more time.” Her husband had fought leukemia and the ravages of treatment for five years. I think of another friend, who couldn’t be with us around the table that night because treatment for lymphoma has stripped her young son’s body of the ability to fight infections. Her son, quarantined in the hospital, just wishes he could spend the holidays at home. You could think this place a wishing well, our hopes like shiny coins tossed in on frivolous prayers. You could come to believe in the brokenness more than you believe in a glory yet to come. It would be easy, limping home, stopped still right at the door, moments stolen, nursing pain; easy, with your cheeks soaked salty, to fall right into the drowning murk, to touch the bottom where all our wishes collect. And without Jesus, that would be the end of it.
But I’ve some good news. Good has always been God’s word, you know. He created everything, made it glitter with his glory, and called it good. Just good. I always want to say stunning, super abundant, astounding, but God, maybe because none of our words could ever contain His glory anyway, chooses good. And the good news is this: out of the stump of King David’s family grew a shoot (Isaiah 11:1), even though shoots don’t grow on dead wood. God not only hears our groans and cares about our wishes, but He grieves our losses—broke Himself over caring–and He overwhelms our wishes with plans for more than we can imagine for ourselves. In his letter to the Roman church, Paul wrote, “I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us (Romans 8:18). What is more, Paul encouraged the Corinthians that trouble, light and momentary by comparison, actually produces weighty and eternal glory in God’s people (2 Corinthians 4:7). The difference in Christ, because of Christ, is that our suffering here is not only not the end of the story but actually carries with it a productive promise. But how, with our real, tangible pain captivating our attention, do we begin to hold eternal treasure in our hands? How do we touch the edges of what to us feels like a mind-bending idea? What is this glory, anyway?
I’m not a Greek scholar, but I can tell, just by looking up the Greek word Paul uses for glory that a funny irony exists in trying to put into words what will not fit words or sight or any other humanly conceivable boundary. The lexicon reaches, defining glory as personal opinion–in other words things like favor and praise, but with heaviness, as in great significance; also splendor and brightness, magnificence, excellence, preeminence, dignity, and grace. And then, as though fumbling a little, it finally summarizes with, “the absolute perfect inward and personal excellence of Christ” and “the unspoken manifestation of God.” I tap the page and smile, because all this basically boils down to the promise of an existence that absolutely blows our minds, a majesty that defies our limited thoughts and half blind eyes. This is the unseen to which scripture points our faith and our focus (2 Corinthians 4:18). It is the experience and persistent truth of God in the midst of our struggle with brokeness. That which is ultimately the reach of all our groaning–no more death or mourning or crying or pain, as the apostle John says (Revelation 21:4); eternal relationship; everything good–this glory yet to be revealed, is something we can never seize for ourselves, but which God seized for us in the person of Jesus Christ. Our wishes for healing collect at the base of the pit, and those wishes would amount to nothing but frivolousness, except. Except Jesus. Thoughts, words, eyes can’t hold glory, and because of Jesus, neither can tombs. God has promised a departure between what is happening in our bodies, that is, the descent toward the grave, and what is happening in our souls, that is, ever-increasing glory. “Therefore we do not lose heart. Though outwardly we are wasting away, inwardly we are being renewed day by day (2 Corinthians 4:17).”
There’s a reason God commands us to give thanks in all circumstances (1 Thessalonians 5:18). I start slow, my hand still rubbing circles on Riley’s back. Carefully, I worship. Thank you for the warmth of her. Thank you for husband and son and daughters and home; for love that never fails; for honesty; for Kevin catching just in time; for ice packs and medicine; for friends wrapping arms and wiping tears. Thank you for simmering smells; for stunning skies and vibrant falling leaves hinting at something bigger than the end we think we see. Shall we accept good from God and not trouble (Job 2:10)? Job’s question still hangs in the atmosphere, begging our surrender. Our fingers can only gather glory in daily graces, and our hands can only hold enough for this day, but gradually, this grateful accounting impresses on my limited, scarred-up heart the infinite truth: God–his glory, his ineffable excellence, his limitless love, overwhelms the pain of today. Hope isn’t pennies flung; it’s a persevering investment of faith in the truth of God. And the returns, well, we just can’t imagine.
So we don’t just wish; we hope.
