Beauty on the Backroads

Stories of grace for life's unexpected turns

Archives for April 2015

When all you can do is be still

I woke Sunday morning with back pain so bad I had trouble walking. The tightness would grip me and I would cry out and lean against someone or something or drop to my knees. Anything to relieve the pain.

It was the most helpless I’ve felt physically since giving birth to my children.

That was enough to convince my husband that we needed to head to urgent care where I would at least get some medication to help with the pain. Two hours of waiting and I was given painkillers and muscle relaxers to manage the pain until it passes or I decide to take another course of action.

So I spent a lot of Sunday being still, not by choice but by necessity.

Yu-chuan Hsu | Creative Commons | via unsplash

Yu-chuan Hsu | Creative Commons | via unsplash

It’s a humbling thing to be in so much pain and rely on others to get you the things you need. I reserved my energy for the effort it took to get off the couch only for necessity (the bathroom).

And I realized that I don’t sit still very well. All day I fought the urge to get up. For food. For drink. To help the kids. Just to do something different. And I found myself getting frustrated because all I did was sit. And rearrange my position for comfort. When I was hungry or needed water, I had to ask. When the rice sock needed re-heating, I had to ask. Apparently I’m not very good at asking, either.

So, it was a hard spot for me to be in. Today I’m a bit better, but still trying to take it easy. My husband is home today, but he won’t be tomorrow and I want to be able to participate in our lives again. It’s a scary prospect, not knowing when or if you’ll be able to do regular life stuff again.

Being still has been my only choice, and I’m surprised at how hard it is.

Is it harder because I didn’t choose it? Because it’s the result of pain?

There’s a psalm that says, “Be still and know that I am God.” And I want to believe that I can do that in the midst of everyday life, but when stillness is a necessity and I resist it, maybe I’m in desperate need of it after all. Maybe I need to, even when I’m not bound by pain, behave as though I am. I am a master at starting a dozen different things and finishing none. I am notorious for sitting down to do one thing and remembering 10 other things I could be doing.

Be still? Who has time?

And yet, being still is a gift.

From my vantage point on the couch, I saw a robin land on the tree branches in our front yard, and I watched him watch us, sitting there for minutes. I heard my kids say actual words instead of just hearing their noise. I was aware of everything going on around me because I was undistracted by anything else. And I was dependent on others, so I felt I needed to be present mentally with them. Our daughter snuggled close and I appreciated the closeness. Some days, I’ve been touched too much and can’t handle another sensation, but last night I needed it.

I also took a 2-hour nap, aided by the medicine, I’m sure, but that’s almost unheard of for me. Twenty minutes on rare occasions is about my limit. I’ve resisted naps for as long as I can remember, afraid of missing out. Maybe this is why I choose not to be still. I’m afraid I’ll be missing something.

Stillness is both a necessity and a luxury, and I need to treat it as such.

To the world around me, stillness might look like idleness. But it’s not the same thing.

And maybe that’s what I’m afraid of, too. That if I’m still, I’ll be looked at as lazy. Ours is a culture that values the doers, not the be-ers, so I convince myself to do and do and do until I’m done. (And honestly, who of us is ever done?) Or overdone.

This back pain/muscle strain is a combination of overdoing it (cleaning, walking, chasing the kids at the park) and underdoing it. I have neglected my health for years, and this is just one more indicator that I need to take care of myself.

Otherwise, I’ll be celebrating my 37th birthday next week like an 87-year-old–limitedly mobile, with body aches and pains, ingesting medicine to keep me functioning.

There is a time to do and a time to be, and I pray that I will know and sense the difference. And give equal value to both times.

Something else this forced stillness has reminded me: I want to be well. I don’t want to keep telling the children I can’t do this or that with them because my back hurts. I don’t want this to be my life, and it doesn’t have to be. At least not yet. I have options to relieve my back pain that doesn’t yet involve surgery or chronic pain. Exercise, chiropractic care, yoga, orthopedic footwear. All of these are possibilities, and I am thankful for the choices.

Being still is also a choice. I can say “no” to busyness, “no” to doing one more thing, “no” to my value being only in what I do instead of in who I am.

I don’t have to like it, at least not at first, but stillness is a gift, forced or unforced. And I will learn to appreciate it.

Have you ever been forced to “be still” because of illness or injury? How did you handle that time? What keeps you from regularly being still in your life?

News travels fast (and then what?)

We wake up to the news that an earthquake has devastated Nepal.

And my day begins with a burdened feeling for people I don’t even know. I search Twitter for news. For photos. I scan Facebook for news about people I know who live/work/travel in the area. I am hungry for information and in the information age, news comes as quickly as fast food through a drive-up window.

Quick. Now. Instant. I want to know everything and I want to know it now.

On the one hand, it’s a blessing. Tragedy strikes and we can know within hours if loved ones, friends, acquaintances are safe. We can mourn in real time with those who are suffering. We are connected across oceans in ways that still astound me.

News travels fast.

Pavan Trikutam | Creative Commons | via unsplash

Pavan Trikutam | Creative Commons | via unsplash

Sometimes, though, it’s a curse. News travels so fast that it’s often just as quickly forgotten.

Today, we are focused on Nepal. And maybe tomorrow we will be, too.

But our attention will fade long before the work is done. We will move on and those who have suffered loss will remain in their pain.

We swear we’ll never forget but we do. All the time.

Remember Ebola? There are people in Liberia and other West African nations who have daily been unable to forget because they are on the ground in the midst of the outbreak, doing the work.

Or what about the university attacks in Kenya?

Or how about Hurricane Sandy? Or the Midwestern tornado that leveled an Illinois town called Fairdale? Or any other countless disasters that wreck lives on any given day?

We can’t remember them all. We’re human, aren’t we? And the world is so messed up that bad news seems to be the only news, and who needs that to drag them down day after day? Right?

I confess: it’s easier to turn off the TV, or not watch the news in the first place, or scroll past the Tweets or Facebook posts about tragedy, or scan them with a “not-another-one” attitude. I do it all the time.

I’m not proud of that.

When I was a newspaper reporter, the pressure was high to publish breaking news and follow up on that news in the days after. But every day was something new and sometimes one tragedy trumped another. We’d make it to the one-year anniversary of an event and I’d think, “Has it been a year already?”

News travels fast and time passes quickly and life goes on.

But what if it’s your tragedy?

We can blame the media, but it’s not really their fault. If it’s anyone’s fault, it’s mine. (And yours. But I can only deal with my fault. You’ll have to deal with yours.)

As I scrolled through Twitter today, looking at pictures from Nepal, I wondered about the role of the photographers. I questioned the sanity of people tweeting while running from an avalanche on Everest. I even wondered if I should believe everything I read on the Internet.

When news travels fast, it’s not always accurate, at least not at first, but there are circumstances where some news is better than no news, even if it’s wrong. (The journalist inside me is screaming “NO” at that statement.)

It is good for us to see that people are huddling in tents in Kathmandu as night falls. And it’s good for us to be reminded that the water supply is dwindling. And it is right that we know that the death toll is climbing. Because the more we know, the more we’ll connect, and the longer we’ll remember.

At least, I hope so.

We want to help, I think. Most of us do, anyway. So we send money. We pray. Or if it’s a closer-to-home tragedy, maybe we bring food. Send a card. Take a team to help.

Maybe you respond to suffering and tragedy like I do. You want to do something NOW. You want to spring into action. Head to wherever the tragedy is, to whomever is suffering, swoop in and fix it.

The truth is that there are no quick fixes to tragedy, and lots of organizations (the Red Cross, Samaritan’s Purse) respond immediately. Even individually, we are good at clearing our consciences by helping or offering to help right away.

But what happens a month later? Or a year later? Or 10 years later?

The woman who has lost her husband unexpectedly continues to grieve well after the funeral is over. The mother who loses a child aches forever. When the camera crews go home after a hurricane or a tornado, the work continues. The rebuilding doesn’t stop. I remember standing in the moldy, water-stained house of a family in North Carolina a year after their community was destroyed by a hurricane. Almost everything they had belonged to FEMA, and our little crew from Indiana barely remembered the storm.

My heroes are first-responders of any kind. The men and women who rush in when others are fleeing. They are a special breed of human, and sometimes I think that if I am not built to be a first-responder then maybe I can’t help at all.

We need first-responders. Desperately. But we also need second-responders. And third. And tenth. We need–and need to be–people who show up not just on the day of but on the day after. And days after. Who step in when the wounds we can see have been bandaged but the wounds we can’t see are still oozing.

I don’t know how we do that except to be responsible for our own intake of information. Maybe we need to clear our Twitter feeds of celebrity gossip and TV shows (guilty) and fill it with news sources, relief agencies, charitable organizations. Maybe we need to watch the news once in a while or read a newspaper.

Maybe we need to do more. (Check out what a couple of guys from our denomination are doing to support the Ebola relief in Liberia.)

Maybe we need to read the articles and look at the pictures and sit with our grief when these things happen. We don’t need to feel good and happy all the time. We can mourn with those who mourn. (I should also say that there are times when we need to not to do this, too. Say, if a personal tragedy is still fresh and raw. We can step away for a time from situations that will cause us more grief personally. It’s just easy for that to turn into an all-out avoidance of any kind of suffering. I know this from personal experience.)

What other ideas do you have?

An inspiring book on this subject is Eugene Cho’s Overrated. What a challenge to us to stop being in love with the idea of changing the world and actually start changing the world.

And if you’ve never heard the song “Now the News” by Eli, check it out and let yourself be challenged by its message.