Resurrection and the gift of a wounded body

Since today is Easter, I’ve been trying to think of something inspiring to say. But I thought I would tell the truth about something in my life that sucks which I desperately want to narrate into a blessing. I have lost twenty pounds since December. It’s not because I’ve been good about exercising or eating well. It’s because I have a condition known as ulcerative colitis, which causes me to need to sit on the toilet 15-20 times a day. Over the past couple of months, my colitis caused a secondary infection called C. Diff., which has required heavy duty antibiotics. I have basically felt like I’ve had the flu for the two months, and I’ve spent half of my awake time in the bathroom. Twice I’ve had good days which I interpreted to mean that I was on the mend, but then my disease came roaring back. My church has been praying for me, and it’s really seemed to help, for a day or two at a time. So I guess I wanted to name the gifts I have received from this miserable disease as a way of flicking off Satan and proving to him that he has failed to disillusion me since God can turn all things into good.

The first gift I’ve received has been a sense of helplessness. I will never forget a desperate moment I had in the satellite parking lot of the Detroit airport last weekend. When you’ve got colitis, you have about three minutes to get to a bathroom from the time that you first feel the urge to go. I needed to go, and I couldn’t decide whether it was better to stand or sit in the shelter for the shuttle van. Several vans came to the parking lot, circled around, and left without stopping by my shelter. I was almost to the point of going in between two cars to take care of my business. But I didn’t have anything I could use to get clean. So I just started praying. Finally another shuttle van came. The driver was very apologetic. I did my own version of Lamaze breathing to try to keep everything in during the trip. And somehow God got me to the bathroom in time. There’s a sense of dependence on God that I never could have learned without the terror of crapping my pants in a public space.

The second gift has been a sense of my mortality. I don’t want to get too graphic, but the depletion of energy from my body sometimes when I go potty has made me feel like my life was literally being sucked out of me. I’ve almost fainted a couple of times. I’ve  actually pulled muscles in my shoulder and back. What a ridiculous thing to pull your muscle over! Many days I haven’t wanted to eat anything. Every kind of food just makes me feel gross. I tried a gluten-free diet for a month. Not sure I’m going to sustain it because it didn’t make a bit of difference with my condition. But somehow this mortality has been a strange blessing especially during the season of Lent. It makes each moment eternal. It makes prayer very real when you’re wondering what your long-term prognosis is really going to be. Whereas I had always been a pretty gluttonous, thoughtless eater in the past, I’ve had to decide to eat when I didn’t want to with the sense that choosing to eat was choosing to live. Life becomes more epic when frying three eggs in the morning and eating all of them along with some yogurt and a banana is an act of warfare against the forces trying to suck out my life.

The third gift has been my need for resurrection. Tonight we had a church picnic to celebrate Easter. We were going to go out to a nearby lake, but it was too crowded. So we just did it in our church parking lot. I was relieved that we didn’t go because there wouldn’t have been a nearby, accessible bathroom. It got me thinking about the “heavenly banquet” that we always talk about in the liturgy for communion. The foolish, desperate thing that I believe is that somehow I will be resurrected into a body that can feast on all types of food without worrying about what will come out on the other end. The thing with colitis is that it doesn’t go away. Once you’ve got it, the rest of your life will consist in flareups and remissions until you get your colon removed altogether and either have your small intestine shaped into a pseudo-colon or get a colostomy bag. I need a resurrected body. I don’t need one as badly as people with cancer or ALS or Parkinson’s. But it’s a gift for resurrection to be a real physical need instead of just a speculative theological topic. It forces me to go “all in” in a way that I wouldn’t otherwise.

I imagine that some of my readers have chronic health conditions that suck. I can’t tell you what you’re supposed to think about them. I would just say that finding the gift within them is not a denial of the pain or injustice you’re suffering. It is rather part of your warfare against Satan. I don’t know exactly who or what Satan is, but he’s the word I use for whatever forces in the universe oppose our well-being and seek to sabotage God’s purpose. I don’t think God gives us crosses to carry to test us or teach us lessons. God rather takes the crosses that Satan has put on our backs, and turns them into means of spiritual transformation and growth. Somehow all of this can be turned into the road to my resurrection. At least that’s the story that’s working for me right now.