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What is faith if not remembering we have a Witness? Big, snotty tissues accumulated in my hands. I let him witness me at my weakest.īig, salty tears poured down my face. “I’ll just pray silently for you to begin,” Jordan explained.Īnd in the silence, I wept. Jordan placed some folding chairs in a circle in the small entryway. Ryan helped me stand and we slowly made our way up the last few steps to the church. “Would you like to sit inside?” he asked. I gripped Ryan’s hand as our priest, Jordan, walked toward us and greeted us. Two hours later, we sat bundled up in our coats in the shade of our church’s bell tower. “I think we need to call Jordan,” he said. Ryan sank onto the linen bedspread next to me and squeezed my hand. You can have all the coping skills in the world and have been abiding with Jesus through storms of suffering for ages, but when your body suddenly wanders into the liminal land of debilitating illness, it will break your heart because loss is loss.

I’m a licensed therapist, and I couldn’t reframe or regulate my way out of despair. The harder truth is, I was scaring myself. Some people use PTO to sit on a beach on vacation, but my husband had just called his boss to use some of his to sit by my side in bed.

My face was still wet from weeping, and I stared and stared at the curtains and the bare tree branches beyond my window, grieving the gap between me and a life beyond bed. But I only saw more waves, and I didn’t think I had it in me to keep treading water. Week after week I held onto hope that one more specialist visit or one more medication would lift me out of the sea of sickness.

Nine weeks since infection toppled one domino after another in my body, leading to three new diagnoses, no substantial progress, and no clear path to getting better. It had been nine weeks since an infection crumpled my immunocompromised body into a heap in bed. And even though the sun was streaming through our turquoise curtains, everything seemed dark. I was curled on my side in bed, too exhausted to sit up. Hope is an anchor for the soul, but the rope to mine sure seemed long.