When I opened my eyes, it took me a minute to realize I still felt the same. Every night as I lay in bed, I prayed the same thing: “Lord, I am begging you to heal me. Give me strength and energy to do the things I want to do, to take care of my family, to play with my kids and to do more.” I often cried myself to sleep and yet each morning I woke up and expected my circumstances to have miraculously changed. And for almost a decade they didn’t. And so I willed myself out of bed, made the kids breakfast, got them ready for school and got them out the door. And by the time I made the 15 minute round trip drive to school and back, I needed to lie down again. I would spend the afternoon standing up to clean up the breakfast dishes and then laying back down in an attempt to gain enough energy to get some laundry done.

Lord, can’t you hear me? Do I need to cry louder, plead more honestly, why is nothing changing? The distance for you to bend down to me Lord seems so vast. I can hardly imagine what that would look like but I yearn for it. Days are evaporating quickly and yet each day feels twice as long. My body hurts and I am just so, so tired. 

Friends would call and ask me to go for a walk or grab coffee and I had to say no. Any extra energy expended meant less for the people I wanted to give it to. And I could never predict if I could handle it – if today would be a day I could hold it together or if I would be suddenly reduced to tears. I struggled with guilt and anxiety about all that was falling on my husband to handle after being at work all day.  

On the outside I am doing my very best to be my old self, but inside I am so desperately discouraged. My heart is sick, withered like grass, I can’t even think about eating. Did I do something to bring this on myself? Do you even see how much I am suffering, Lord?

Kyle and I were having discussions like “What if things never change? What if I feel like this for the rest of our lives?” And in the midst of the cloud of fatigue, pain and suffering, the Psalms reminded me that I was not alone. It was hard for me to be honest with people about how I felt. I was lonely and sad. I felt isolated and yet hearing the deeply distressing words of Psalm 102 (adapted in italics) was like sitting with someone who just gets it. 

For my days vanish like smoke; my bones burn like glowing embers. My heart is blighted and withered like grass;  I forget to eat my food. 

I was in physical pain and I was exhausted and lonely. The days often seemed meaningless as I tried to navigate each one. And my heart was weak. I was losing faith and I felt fragile and small. I honestly think just knowing that someone understood how I was feeling, that someone else could put how I felt into words that resonated with my soul was oddly freeing. Hearing the depth of the psalmists’ suffering and questioning followed by the reminder of God’s steadfastness was enough. It was enough to get me through one day at a time until one doctor finally put the pieces together and I finally had hope. 

As I reflect on that season of my life, I know that finally getting some answers was of great comfort to my soul. I mean, who doesn’t want to hear that there is something wrong that can be fixed? Finding something that had been overlooked that could now be addressed was exactly what I had prayed for – even when I thought the Lord had forgotten me, he had been with me all along. 

You were listening to my prayers. You did not reject my plea. 

Watching someone you love suffer is disorienting. You want to be able to fix it, to be able to pray the right prayer or do the one thing that will bring it all to an end. And during that season, I sensed that from friends and family who loved me so much that my hurt became their own. But I found it so hard to be honest with them because I so desperately wanted what they wanted too – for something to bring this season to a close. Even more than being honest with others, I found it hard to be honest with myself and with God.  I would not let myself say what I was actually feeling. 

If you know me at all, you know that I am deeply feeling, sensitive and bent towards introspection. I love a dark, moody storm because I can relate to it – the sun beforehand, the quick moving clouds, the darkness, the instability in the atmosphere and the unpredictability of it all. And as much as I enjoy the storm, I also connect with the break in the clouds and the smell after it rains, that feeling that things are starting all over again.  If I was honest with myself, if I had been able to be honest with God, I would have moved through the unpredictable range of feelings and deeply distressing thoughts and emotions. Truthfully I didn’t think that this situation could handle any more unpredictability. I simply chose what I could sustain and stuck with it. At least until I started reading through the Psalms and was reminded that what I was experiencing was not unique to me. 

Reading the Psalms in the midst of suffering affected me differently. Suffering is a part of life, and in my own hopelessness I could not stop my heart from being comforted by the honest mourning and groaning of the psalmist – I saw myself in the written word of God. And instead of sinking me, it brought a levity to my heart. In the depth of my soul where doubt and anger were living I felt a sense of peace knowing that my God had placed an entire book in the Bible full of really honest words and thoughts. And I think that was exactly what I needed to acknowledge – that my faith wasn’t dependent on me thinking about this season in the right way, or responding with the appropriate palatable words – while inside I was feeling so incapable and abandoned. Instead I found a new depth to my faith that only suffering could provide: a deeply honest acknowledgment that I will never react exactly as I am supposed to unless I can tap into the hard feelings we aren’t supposed to express. And the Psalms are full of people who were complicated, whose feelings swirled like storms and then stopped – revealing moments of relief.

This is what our God chose to share with us as a model for how to navigate suffering. That despite the ever changing circumstances of life that God is constant and when He feels distant and we can not comprehend all of the “whys”, that his word is filled with other doubters who also honestly struggled before Him in the same ways reminding us:

But you are always the same;

you will live forever.