Behind our house, across the yard and through the woods, is a steam that varies in depth and width, depending on the season.
And a bunch of rocks.
So, naturally, sometimes when I'm down there - particularly by myself - I look for flat rocks to skim across the surface of the stream. It's a guy thing, I guess.
Depending on the size and width of the rock and the variable strength of my arm, I can get the rock to skip three, four, maybe even five or six times.
But here's the thing: no matter how many times it skims and hops, when it slows down the same thing happens. Every time. No matter how much effort I put into it, how hard I throw, how perfect the rock seems to be ...
It struck me that there was something profound there, something meaningful that should be a statement on life in general.
On the other hand, it could be just the manifestation of my own version of cabin fever psychosis.
Let me know if you see it.
I'm amazed at how much progress MG is making. It's remarkable to sit and look at her, talk to her, listen to her, and realize two weeks ago she was just coming out of basically a two-week medically induced coma. She was swollen and cut and bruised, with wires going into her body and tubes coming out and one leg in traction. She didn't move.
I think back to the morning at the hospital when I was waiting for someone - anyone - to come tell me something about MG's condition. I had only seen her briefly since being told she'd been in a serious accident, having arrived at the UAB Emergency Room in time to ride up the elevator with her on her way to surgery. She was already on a ventilator and in a coma, and nobody could really give me a prognosis.
As I waited, a policeman came to see me and tell me that she'd been hit by a drunk driver. Later, another officer came by to see me. Because I didn't know what else to ask, I asked to confirm what I thought I already knew - "Was it a DUI?"
The officer said, "A DUI is the least of this guys' worries. We've charged him with felony assault, and depending on what happens here, we're prepared to up the charges to ..."
I don't know if he actually said what the next charges would be, but I knew: vehicular homicide or manslaughter or whatever it would be if MG "didn't make it" - in other words, if she died. And everyone who responded to the scene of the accident fully expected MG to not make it.
Now, here we were four weeks later (could it really have only been four weeks?) back at UAB after a week at home, when the orthopedic surgeon, Dr. Lowe, came in and, after a little conversation, said, "I think in two or three weeks you may be able to start putting weight on your right leg."
I wasn't sure I'd heard him right. I know I wasn't sure what that meant.
But I do know MG had already been using her right leg to scoot herself around on the bed. She wasn't putting any weight on it, but she was pushing with it. I didn't know if she should be doing that or not, but MG had been so frustrated at being so completely helpless and I knew that her right leg had been, by comparison, uninjured.
(For a recap: the impact fractured the outside of MG's pelvis on the right side, but it didn't require surgery and the doctors didn't seem overly concerned; all their attention was on the clean breaks in the front and back, and the smashed hip joint on the left side. This was, of course, in addition to all the other injuries that are too many to rehash here. I'm not sure I've ever listed every one of them, because it seems every time I do I forget a couple).
For the additional use of her left leg to be officially sanctioned was huge. Not only could she continue to use that leg to scoot on the bed, but it would mean that moving from bed to wheelchair would be immeasurably easier; from wheelchair to toilet or shower or even just a regular chair was going to be a real possibility.
Understand, we'd been told three months without putting feet on the floor. The one hope I was clinging to was that Dr. Lowe had said in "maybe" seven to 10 weeks MG could start putting weight on her right leg, which meant walking. I asked, 'how do you walk on one leg?"
With a walker, I was told. She would be able to take a step forward on the right leg, put all her weight on the walker, then slide her left leg up beside the right one.
To have that possibility moved up to within two or three weeks was ... unbelievable.
As good as that news was, as excited as we were when we got home and began to talk about the possibilities, it didn't take long before the effort of the day took its toll on MG and the pain set in.
It reminded us that there is no shortcut to glory. We could set our vision on the finish line - or rather, in this case the next line in a series of finish lines - but it didn't relieve the pain that MG had to go through that night and the next few days, or the sleepless nights we all had, or the shared suffering that we had to endure along the way.
There is no shortcut to glory. It seems we all, at some point in our lives - or maybe "points" for some of us - have to take that walk through the valley of the shadow of death, when the still waters and that table prepared for us seem to be a long, long way off.
C.S. Lewis in The Problem of Pain called it "the heartbreaking routine of monotonous misery." We don't like to think about our lives that way, because we want to believe we're meant to be comfortable. Work hard, love well, follow God, and it's should be smooth sailing.
But despite what generations of a certain breed of evangelist has told us, nothing in Scripture says that Christians should expect life to be any easier or cleaner or safer than it is for non-Christians. In fact, perhaps if anything, pain serves to keep us connected to a fallen world, identifying with the real-time after-effects of sin and living in a fallen world.
I remember reading about Siddhartha Gautama being raised as a wealthy, protected prince in India who was never allowed outside the walls of the family home. At some point he did finally go outside, and was shocked at the hunger and suffering and pain - aspects of humanity he'd never experienced or been told about before. So, according to Buddhist tradition, Siddhartha's answer was to teach people to do away with yearnings and cravings that he believed caused those feelings of hunger and suffering and pain. Do away with the desire, accept the lot life has dealt you, and you find inner peace. And so Siddhartha became the Buddha.
Then you read the story of Jesus, who - for sake of comparison - left his protected, safe place in Heaven to experience life on earth. But rather than accept pain, Jesus taught us to bring relief to those in need - to feed the hungry, heal the sick, do our best to do as much as we can to combat the evil that exists in this fallen world; to rebel against the status quo. And He suffered right along with humanity; as British writer Dorothy Sayer wrote, "For whatever reason God chose to make man as he is ... He had the honesty and courage to take His own medicine ... He has Himself gone through the whole human experience, from the trivial irritations of family life and the cramping restrictions of hard work and lack of money to the worst horrors of pain and humiliation, defeat, despair, and death. When He was a man, He played the man. He was born in poverty and died in disgrace and thought it well worthwhile ..."
I much prefer fighting than accepting.
And I think sometimes we lose sight of that Christian concept - that we don't accept the world the way it is, but fight to make it better.
The problem is that so much of the world doesn't agree with the definition of "better," because it is much easier and more comfortable to accept things the way they are and simply adapt and say, "live and let live" or "let it be."
The first of the so-called seven "virtues" is courage. We think of courage as the absence of fear, but in reality courage is overcoming natural fear. Courage means doing the right thing even at risk of pain or loss.
I think it can apply even to situations' like MG. It would be easier and less painful to lie in bed and just try to be comfortable, but she knows - and we know - that she has to suffer in order to get better. She has to do what her body screams out not to do, in order to allow her body to perform the way it was created to perform.
Even though it hurts.
I may not have figured out the lesson of skimming stones, but I can figure out the lesson of rehab.
That one screams at me every day - and it did even before MG's accident. I just didn't always hear it as clearly as I do now.
Sometimes it hurts to do the right thing. But if we really care, we don't accept life the way it has been dealt to us but say we can make it better.
Even if it hurts.
That's wall-poster philosophy if I ever heard it.
But just because something is trite doesn't mean it's not true.
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