Watch out! I’m coming in hot…What in the actual fuck is going on lately? That’s what people keep saying. It’s the new, more specific version of the old, tried and true: “What the fuck?”. The old way just wasn’t cutting it this year. The old way didn’t have enough meat on the bones to satisfy us. Now, we are demanding to know more, what is actually going on? This year is just bizarre, we need some answers, details, specifics. What in God’s name is this?
After all the hardship of this year, I’ve found myself having a hard time accessing that bright tone of mine. It wasn’t that long ago when my heart first pulled me to recognize the phrase be a bright spot. Once I leaned into it, I saw how the word bright tied my painting style to my writing style. It tied my style of expression to my style of inspiration. It has served me well, that one word. But now, it’s harder to use. This fall I’ve felt the opposite of bright. You pick the word for it. Dark? Dim? Dull? Discouraged? Yes, any of those would work. I realize we all go there, and it’s only a phase, a temporary thing. The truth is, we can’t remain constantly bright any more than the sun can remain risen. We all wallow in muddy water at times, and I’ve been waist deep lately, but certainly not alone, not this year…not any year.
I’ve been in pain, and I’ve been fed up and frustrated. Why is it taking so long to heal? I’ve been frustrated with social distancing; why does this feel so helpless and endless? I can’t tell if we are suppose to face this thing or hide from it? I’ve been frustrated with my inspiration; how am I suppose to express brightness when I don’t feel it? How do I generate inspiring art and words when I am so off color? These questions made me sink into a funk. I knew I’d have to move to get out of this hole, and I’d have to use art to do it. I’d have to paint with all that I was feeling even if what I created wasn’t bright. I, myself, had written it into the defining poem stating what it means to be a bright spot. “Be all that you are and nothing you’re not.” My art is about truth, and that is something I am not willing to forgo. So, I’d use this painful path to get to wherever I was going. I would lean on it and apply it. I’d have to put my pain to work. I’d have to wade through it.
When I finally shuffled up to my painting palette in my huge hip brace, the color I found myself mixing was different. It was muddy, muted and deep. It looked like fall. It looked like falling. It was not vibrant, but neutral, but it was still color, and it was still light. It was a new kind of bright. And, it showed me that there is brightness even in the dark of night. There is purpose even in pain.
This pain I refer to may literally be your hurting body, but maybe the word pain represents hardship or heartbreak. As you read on, allow the word pain to represent whatever it is you find yourself dealing with on your journey.
They say everything happens for a reason, even the painful times. If everything is laid out and planned for us, if everything, including pain, is purposeful and intended, do our choices make any difference? Do our decisions affect where we end up? I think the answer has everything to do with how we react to pain. I believe the path is set out for us to follow, but fear influences how far we tread. When you come across a dark, murky river as you travel along the journey of life, will you fearfully wait or courageously trust the journey and wade through pain?
Fear will yank on your sleeve. He wants you to sit and wait, to doubt yourself, to doubt your strength and your endurance. He wants to keep you here, stuck. Fear says, “It’s gonna hurt, you know? It’s gonna be hard, and everything will be different. Just think about that.” And, so we do. Sometimes we wait with the fear of pain. We sit on the bank wasting time while we consider how much it’s gonna suck to get wet and muddy in that river. Fear makes us ask, “Why do I have to cross this stupid river anyway? Why me? It’s not fair.”. But, when Courage shows up with her quiet confidence, she suggests otherwise. Courage would never insist you sit down and use up your time complaining about the challenges you see ahead. She is a warm, supportive hand on your shoulder prompting you to trust the journey, to trust that even the pain you may encounter along the way will have a purpose, even if you can’t see it now. Courage wills you to keep going and carry on with your journey encouraging you to wade through, pain and all.
So, there you are. You took the lead of courage, and now you’re in it, a muddy, murky river with currents pulling and ripping around you. This hurts. Fear was right. There would be pain.
Fear tries to protect you from pain at all costs. Fear wants to protect you so much that he is willing to keep you from the life you were sent to live. Courage is not afraid, though, and she reminds you that you are capable of enduring much more than fear gives you credit for. Courage will see you through to the other side carrying you on to the places where there is color and light. Courage says “Do not fear pain for it provides the kind of perspective nothing else can.”. Pain is the toll we pay to reach the light.
Ok, so, what happens when we can’t choose whether or not to wade in? Many times we are shoved into a place of pain with no choice. Sometimes we stumble into the river while hesitantly trying to keep one foot on the bank. Fear has his buddies, hesitation and resentment, helping him hold a tight grip around your ankle. For example, when we get sick we have no choice but to experience the pain at hand, but in this case our choice isn’t if we experience it, it’s how we experience it. If we are in this river while keeping one foot up there with fear then we aren’t getting anywhere. This river is no longer purposeful, it's useless. It isn’t taking us anywhere. When we aren’t willing to utilize this stretch to cover ground, we might as well be sitting high and dry and stuck with fear. Except, this is worse because, like it or not, now you're wet and muddy and stuck. You have pain with fear.
Your other choice is to ditch the fear and his idiot friends, paddle through this river which we had no choice but to get into, and trust that this too is part of the journey. Take trust as a flotation device and wade in.
Fear is a restraint that holds us back, keeps us waiting and worrying. But, not pain. Pain doesn’t keep us stuck like fear can. Only the fear of pain keeps us stuck. But, pain can be a literal restriction, so how is it that fear is the stronger force? How can fear be stronger when it is only imagined, and pain is physical? How can fear be more powerful when it is only a head game, and pain is an actual sensation coming from a broken part of the body? Fear paralyzes us by leading us to think we don’t have the strength to withstand pain. Fear can hold onto us forever, but the river of pain is often a temporary piece of the path. This is how we can find ourselves too afraid to trek towards our own lives. This is how the fear of pain can be more restricting and miserable than pain itself.
At first, it was just a small hurt, but it grew. There was no accident or injury, just a brand new pain that I could not explain. At the very beginning of this year, for the first time in my life, I had hip pain. I would come to find out that I was born with hip dysplasia, which led to a torn labrum thirty five years later and not a minute sooner. Cue 2020, the age of one thing after another. It’s stacking up high, isn’t it? And, this hip pain, well for me, it was just the latest layer on this shit cake we’ve been baking since March.
So, what did I do about it? For the first six months, I did what lots of “busy” people do; nothing. I ignored it. I didn’t have time for pain. So, I paced around it, pretending to not notice, waiting for it to go away. Until late summer, when it was no longer something I could ignore. I couldn’t take walks or sleep. I could hardly carry my child or walk through the sand and water at the beach. When it became challenging just to stand and paint, it was time to deal with it. It was time to wade in.
The same way that little ache grew into a big pain, a two hour repair surgery turned into months of healing. I was never very clear on what to expect for recovery, but swift was not going to be the word for it. As it turned out, my hip needed more than a little cartilage repaired. The surgeon scraped and shaped my bones to allow the ball and socket to fit together properly, dislocating the entire joint in the process. There has been pain, of course, but along with it came sleep loss, stress, depression, discouragement, even regret. These are the emotions and experiences that get unpacked when you’re keeping company with pain. But, the other thing this unwelcome house guest brought me would change the way I carried on in my journey. Perspective.
By this point, COVID-19 had already brought us all a brand new stronger sense of fear. More than just a fear of contracting the virus, we've dreaded dealing with the whole thing and the effects it might have on our daily lives and our businesses, our educations, our economy, our waistlines, our mental freaking stability…. a fear of not knowing when or how it could strike would hang heavy like a wet blanket. The list of virus worries is long. But, that particular fear was belittled once I found myself hip deep in this other river. And, then, in 2020’s perfect timing, just as I was making progress and gaining strength crossing the muddy waters of surgery recovery, just as the other side was almost in sight…. ding! The next layer of shit cake was done baking and ready to pile on top. A little cough grew into a lot of ache, and a little cold was actually a big, well-known virus. But, it was weird…suddenly a few weeks of quarantine and a virus to rest off just seemed like another river to wade through, another way to travel through time, another opportunity to get somewhere specific. So, there I was using my hip pain’s handy hostess gift; perspective.
What I feared for months had finally come to the door, and by the time I answered it, I was already entertaining a house guest that was an even bigger pain in the ass. Misery does love company. Join us, won’t you?
So, there we were, aching hips, COVID lungs and me, bunked up in my yellow bedroom for ten days. What a pair of roommates. Once again swapping my painting palette for a keyboard and my painting apron for pajamas. How familiar this scene was getting. How acquainted I’d become this fall with my second form of expression and that lonely sting of FOMO. This felt like my waiting room. But, I wanted to know how, instead, could I make this my wading room?
When the virus became another river to cross, I had to choose whether I would wait or wade. Will I get stuck in a fearful panic, perpetually Cloroxing and Lysoling, obsessively worrying about spreading it to my family, finding a way to control the thing, googling info, spinning my wheels, stuck in the mud? Yes. Why, yes I would, but only at first. Because then, I would remember that there is to be purpose in all times. So, instead of waiting with the fear of the worst, I just went ahead and waded in for all it’s worth. Of course, I didn’t have a choice on whether or not to have covid. The choice was in how I handled being sick. I did remain isolated from my family, and I was useless most of the time. I could hardly breathe, and I could not think to save my life; not a very productive state. I rested when I felt like resting, which was a lot, and I watched tv when my brain felt like a marshy bog, which it mostly did, but then, when I sensed a concept in it all, a place for this chapter in the epic, big picture novel of my life, of our lives, I would write. I would wake up in a moment of clarity and write something down on the nearest piece of paper or type parts of this essay, which I’d later have to make sense of. Some days I wrote for hours on hours. Some days I used every bit of brain power to generate these reflections leaving myself so mentally drained I could not talk. Not exaggerating. This virus is a brain thing. The fog was thick, but somehow, through the density, I found trust that there would be purpose in this leg of the journey, too, and so I waded in by believing that this was taking me, us, some place specific.
I realize now that the period of denial I went through earlier this summer was another waiting room. I spent the months of July and August actually considering the option of doing nothing about my hip pain.
I could just stay, I could just wait, live here in this place where nothing gets better and maybe it won’t get worse if I just do nothing, right? If I don’t have the surgery, I won’t have to put my family out, or deal with that intense kind of surgery pain or the hassle of physical therapy. Still, this choice has a cost; the cost of being inactive, not moving, not getting anywhere.
Isn’t that ridiculous? I actually considered letting fear tell me to wait… even after I had already been painting and reflecting through a deep exploration of fear and the power it has on us. Even when we are fully aware of the deceptive power of fear, we still let it yank on our sleeve. Fear is very persuasive.
If we let fear talk us into waiting, are we still on a journey? Are we still traveling through time? Or are we just wasting time, waiting for it to pass? What sense does it make to stop covering ground, taking in the lovely views just because that daunting little voice tempts us to doubt our capability, our endurance? So after considering the cost of waiting, I realized it wasn’t worth it, and I waded in. I’d find the reason for this experience on the other side of the river, but I’d have to get wet and muddy first.
We don’t get to choose when and what rivers we come to, but we can choose our response to them. Sometimes we stumble up to a river, caught off guard and unprepared. Even then, we can trust there is a reason for us to have landed there. So, go ahead, and experience it in full. Allow yourself to feel what you feel while you're there. Take it all in for what it’s worth because it is worth something, otherwise you wouldn’t have ended up there. But, don’t pitch a tent and set up camp. Don’t stick around with fear. Don’t wait. Use this path to keep going. Even if the colors seem muted and dark, paint with them anyway.
You may be scratching your head. Use it? How do I use pain? How do I paint with it if I’m not a painter? How do I apply this experience constructively? For starters, stop asking “how” and start asking “why?”. Why did I come here? Why do I need this moment?
Maybe you’ve been called on. Does God want you to connect with the other people who are or will be crossing this same river? Or, maybe this is God steering you, telling you that you’re veering away from the path He has set you on or that you are missing something He’s been trying to get you to notice along the way. Maybe, He’s brought you to this river because this way, there is no getting around Him, no ignoring His purposeful plans. Sometimes, God needs to get our attention, in a way we can’t pretend to not notice.
“We can ignore even pleasure. But pain insists upon being attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world....No doubt pain as God's megaphone is a terrible instrument…”
― C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain
Lewis is right, pain is a terrible instrument, but it is a very effective one, too. I want to cry every time I see someone running or walking down the sidewalk. I am craving exercise, I want to move my body. It’s called “feeling sorry for yourself”. It’s not a welcome feeling, and it comes with a shameful connotation. But, it’s a feeling, a temporary reaction and not a place of residence and something we should notice and utilize. Even these emotions we were taught to resist have a source and a reason for surfacing. Recognizing how we feel about our circumstances can help us compartmentalize. I’ve learned to be choosy with where and how I apply the small ration of energy and strength I’ve had since my hip problems began. I have to be decisive and designated. Could this actually be a request, one I could not ignore or walk around, a plea to shift gears, steady the pace as to not burn up the engines? A demand to get focused because Lord knows I have tried to do it all in recent years. Is this an opportunity to decide exactly what I want to put my energy towards?
A challenge must be an opportunity or else it becomes an obstruction. Pain must be purposeful or else we wouldn’t be surviving it. We bear pain. We cannot choose to put it away, to ignore it because we don’t want to deal with it. We were intended to feel it deeply. When pain gets our attention something needs to get noticed. When something needs noticing, it will be impossible to ignore.
I trust my inspirations. I let inspiration lead me to the places I need to be. I lean into each tug allowing it to pull me towards the color and light. These days, inspiration is adamantly asking me for more specifics. Like a ruthless gossiper, it’s no longer content with my broad, vague words like heart and bright. It wants the damn truth!…about fear, courage and pain. So, I abide because it feels connected to something bigger than me. I paint and write and read and look and listen gathering up and exploring new understandings, new perspectives.
I allowed inspiration pull me close to fear, and I’ve really gotten to know this fear fellow. I know that he lives in our head, and I know how he teams up with hesitation, resentment and vulnerability. I recognize his tactics. I know how quickly we are to settle with fear, how strongly fear influences our choices, and how fear withholds us from walking towards the life we were sent to live. Fear wants us to wait and wait until there is no more time left. By getting close to fear, I was introduced to courage. I know she lives in our hearts. I know that courage can effectively leave fear in its wake. I know the key to having courage over fear is knowing where each one resides, where each one comes from. One is in the heart, and one is in the head. One is associated with faith, and one is most certainly not.
Once I drew that conclusion, inspiration got even more specific. It asked me to use what was close at hand, to lean into what hurt and make color and light with it. You want me to do what?! That felt like a wild contradiction. It didn’t feel bright. It didn’t look like my kinda color and light. But, the path had led me here, to a river, and there was no way to move ahead without going through it. How does this darkness fit into my picture? How can this be uplifting when it feels so low? I didn’t understand it at first, but I leaned in anyway. I began to paint even though it was painful. I started to share even as my voice shook. I kept trusting that there was purpose in this task, in this inspiration. And, there was. Be all that you are and nothing you’re not. Use what’s at hand. Lean in even though you don’t see what it’s pulling you towards. It wasn’t a question of how. It was a question of why.
Nothing is creatively propelling like pain. Look at all the music and art that’s been created from such a place. Inspiration has shown me that pain pushes us into a new depth and allows us to tap into an unknown reservoir of strength. And, as low as it feels, it provides us with the highest peak of perspective.
This year, as the months progressed, as the hardships grew, as pain went from an ignorable nag to an insistent sting, as the things I feared came to the door and into the house, I become more acquainted with courage. This time last year, my body wasn’t broken, it didn’t hurt to walk and to breathe. But, this time last year, I wasn’t this strong. My heart wasn’t this trusting. I wasn’t leaning into my challenges, I was trying to keep them at a distance. My inspiration knew what was coming up around the corner. It knew this was the year to call on me in very specific ways. The whole world would come to know fear, courage and pain this year. We were all about to wade into a river. We would get wet and muddy and stuck. We would get fed up and want some answers, some details and specifics. In the most colorful way we would ask each other, “What in the actual fuck is going on”?
We are wading through a river along a journey towards a new place.
That’s what a journey is about, right? It’s about carrying ourselves through space and time towards a new place. In my moments of wading this year, I recognized that getting wet and dirty and tired along the way is part of the process, but, ultimately, if we leave fear behind and trek into the wild with a heart packed with courage and faith, one day, we wil reach the light where we will get clean and rest our tired feet. One day, I’ll wash the stubborn, oily film from my painter’s hands. But, not yet. I’ll keep getting paint under my nails, wading towards the light. There’s something out there and it pulls on me from my heart. I sense it the most when I paint, when I really get in there and make a sloppy, oily mess. I believe God made me a painter to keep me close to Him. He made me curious about color and light to pull me in, to allow me to notice things. The further down this curious path I go, the closer I get. The more I lean, the harder He pulls.
When do we lean the hardest? At our happiest times we may be counting blessings, but are we falling to our knees desperate for guidance and strength if things are all hunky-dory? Are we grasping for something to hold onto when we feel safe and secure? No. So, maybe pain is God’s way of holding us close, keeping us noticing, keeping us inspired and aware of what should never go unnoticed. Do we walk through the dark so that we remain in need of His light? Is this His way of teaching us to trust that whatever awaits us ahead is His purposeful plan? I believe, one step at a time, He is teaching us to walk completely blinded, to lean into His pulls no matter how terrifying and contradicting the obstacles ahead may look. We don’t use our eyes to look right at the light. Instead we use our hearts. When we lean into the pulls as we wade through the rivers, we find ourselves with the strength to cross and carry on down the path.
Have I not commanded you? Be strong and courageous. Do not be frightened, and do not be dismayed, for the Lord your God is with you where ever you go. Joshua 1:9
Leave fear high and dry. Trust that every river is an essential portion of the journey you were made to travel. Wade through pain and hardship towards a place that fear cannot go.
It isn’t suppose to be clean and painless. We are not meant to know what awaits us on the other side of each river. We were only meant to trust that whatever is over there, is worth crossing for.
