🫁 Stay: When it Hurts to Breathe
A Lent invitation to be honest about hurt and held by Love.
Beeps and buzzes of the emergency department flutter in and out of our room. Propped on plastic pillows, my feverish son’s long legs dangle dangerously close to the edge of his bed.
I look at him — all fourteen years of him — under the fluorescent hospital lights. I remember when he was a toddler, and I climbed into his metal hospital crib to watch Toy Story with him, rubbing his back until he forgot his IV and finally fell asleep.
“Why didn’t you tell us you didn’t feel well?” I ask. Again.
Two hours ago, we pulled into our driveway after a three-and-a-half-hour road trip home from a trip to a cabin with friends. As we brought in luggage, we noticed he was shivering. Turns out his fever was high. Really high.
“I didn’t want to ruin the trip,” he offers, too tired to even play on his phone.
My heart drops.
My son, with the size 13 feet and heart just as big.
My son, with the chronic illness I can’t fix.
I tell him he wouldn’t have ruined anything. I tell him I wish I could trade places with him.
We wait for blood draw results and chest x-ray readings.
I rub his back.
“Why?” he asks me, “Why does God allow pain?”
All around us, creation groans. The world is not as it should be. Death and despair, destruction and discord linger in the dark corners of our lives, no matter how many lamps we turn on and flashlights we wield.
We want to ignore the pain. We want to avoid the ache in our hearts and pretend it doesn’t exist. But like a child who covers their eyes while playing hide-and-seek, our avoidance is futile.
We can push down our coughs and ignore our fevers, but pain left unchecked can wreak havoc on our bodies until we’re grasping for breath.
Like my son, it can turn into pneumonia.
Lent is a season we often want to ignore. Forty days of reflecting on our weaknesses, on the vulnerabilities we carry deep inside our bones, is no fun at all. But it’s only by grappling with the pain of the human condition that we can reach out and touch the beauty of God becoming one of us and changing the course of history forever.
Lent can sometimes feel like a journey away from God, and who wants that? No, we want to celebrate the newness of life without wrestling with the need for it.
As we sat in that emergency room, I tried to find words to comfort my son that didn’t explain away his physical and emotional pain with tired cliches or oversimplified answers.
I took and breath and tried to pray. I couldn’t come up with much.
Whispers of doubt became waves of panic that filled my chest.
Why does God allow this? Is God really with us?
As Lent leads us in a slow march toward Holy Week, I’m reminded that doubt can be holy.
Jesus himself “groaned out of the depths,” crying out, “My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?” (Matthew 27:46)
If Jesus, who himself was fully God, felt this deep pain—why do we so often think that a faithful life is an anesthetized one?
In Into the Silent Land, Martin Laird writes that God doesn’t know how to be absent.
“The fact that most of us experience throughout most of our lives a sense of absence or distance from God is the great illusion that we are caught up in; it is the human condition.”
Martin Laird
The words cried out by Jesus echo Psalm 22:1-2.
God, God . . . my God!
Why did you dump me
miles from nowhere?
Doubled up with pain, I call to God
all the day long. No answer. Nothing.
I keep at it all night, tossing and turning.
I don’t know about you, but the lack of answers to my prayers feels like stones on my chest.
Rounds of antibiotics are pushed through IVs. The blood work comes back okay, and the fever begins to go down.
We will get to go home.
It’s way past dinner time, but my teenager regains his appetite and asks for the Angel Reese special at McDonalds.
I turn right into the parking lot and finally let myself exhale as we idle in the drive-thru.
“Hey, Mom?” he says, not looking up from his phone.
“Yeah, bud?”
“Thank you.”
“Thank you for what?”
“For sticking by me. For not leaving my side.”
I blink back tears.
I tell him that he never has to say thank you for me or his dad being with him. That we want to be with him. That we are so glad that we get to be the ones who are alongside him, and he can always be honest about how he feels because it is never a burden to us and if we don’t share how we’re actually feeling, we won’t feel better, and our illness will just grow.
I am not the hero of this story. I am just a parent who aches to take the place of their sick child, who could never fathom leaving their side.
Maybe that’s why we trudge through these 40 days. Not to forget, but to remember that the deepest love of a parent will not leave our side. Our doubts won’t push Love away, and our thanks won’t bring Love closer.
Love is in the hospital room.
Love is in the minivan on the way to McDonalds.
We may not feel it or even sense it, but Love does not leave us.
Love absorbs our pain like a parent who aches for their child, holding the hurt with arms stretched wide.
Maybe the best we can hope for on our Lenten journeys is to remember that.
Year of Breath
If you’re new here, welcome. I’m grateful to share this space with you. As I write, we’re on spring break with four kiddos recovering from strep, and I need every ounce of hope to borrow as life nationally and at home feel hard.
If you’re also in need of a little hope, maybe we can find it together.
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I’ll be honest: I’ve been feeling a little discouraged with my writing. Every time I gain momentum on this book draft, something happens beyond my control: the notebooks are pushed away, and the laptop is snapped shut.
I think all of our lives are just kind of…a lot right now. And that’s why I’m writing this book — for those of us who are weary and could use a small daily whisper that we’re not alone. For those of us who ache to remember that Love is holding us, even in the pain, even in the overwhelm.
(I shared a small portion of my early pages with my agent, wondering if anything I cobbled together made any sense. She knows her stuff and encouraged me that the early pages were indeed meaningful and not just word salad, so…I’m choosing to believe her! Haha!)
Anyway, will you pray for me as I continue writing? I’m not writing as someone who has all (or any) of the answers, but rather as someone in the trenches, asking questions alongside you.
Now, onto the good stuff!
Breath Prayer
Monday
INHALE: When I am weak,
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