Broken Bodies

illness and Immanuel

Dec 16, 2024

February 2005

It was the winter during my sixth grade year when what started as a common cold quickly morphed into something more sinister. I remember struggling to catch my breath when I would cough, but I never thought to mention my symptoms to my parents assuming they would soon pass the same as all previous colds had done so before. Feeling mostly improved (other than the lingering breath-stealing cough) I decided I was well enough to play in my soccer game that week. Although the sun was shining, it was anything but warm. Frost blanketed the field, you could see the cold on your breath, and every soccer ball to the skin felt like a thousand stinging needles. I couldn’t tell you whether we won or lost the game, only that I pushed through the burning in my chest that was begging me to stop running. The effects of not listening to my body weren’t instant— they waited until I fell asleep that night to sound the alarm. And sound the alarm they did when I woke up in the middle of the night unable to breathe.

I don’t remember much other than the feeling of panic as I ran into my parent’s room waking them up as I was gasping for air. Time stood still in that moment as every second I struggled to breathe felt like an eternity. I don’t know how long the episode lasted for, just that when I was finally able to breathe again I began to vomit up blood. It was a scary ordeal for an eleven year old. It was the first time I had felt so out of control of my body. The promise of death once a distant verity had, in a moment, become a palpable reality.

“Am I going to die?”
I recall asking the doctor as she tried to uncover what had caused the severe asthma attack.
“I don’t think you’re going to die.”
Her reply shattering my unfounded belief that God wouldn’t let me die until I was old and grey; ideally free from pain and peacefully in my sleep.

It would be many years before I traced back my distrust in God’s care to that doctor’s office. To the lie that took root out of fear and uncertainty:
“God can’t be trusted with my body.”

The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.
John 1:14

Advent season is officially upon us. If you’re unfamiliar with the term, simply defined it means “arrival”. Starting in December, we as Christians spend the days leading up to Christmas reflecting on the birth (or arrival) of Jesus our Savior.

This year, I find myself ruminating on one particular aspect of the Christmas story— that God ‘took on flesh’. What does it mean that God came in a body and how can that inform our own journey as embodied persons?

God as the Word may have existed from the beginning, but Jesus had a birthday. He had a concrete moment in time where, as Paul describes in Philippians, “he (Jesus) gave up his divine privileges; he took the humble position of a slave and was born as a human being (Phil. 2:7).”

What is radical to think about is that God not only took up residence in a body, but also that he came to us as the most dependent and vulnerable of all humans. Jesus didn’t enter earth as an independent adult. He didn’t ride down on the clouds of heaven nor enter our world fully mature. No, he came pregnable and naked— a helpless baby boy. His life entrusted into the hands of human parents. He was nursed, swaddled, rocked, burped and comforted. He knew hunger pangs, scraped knees, and growing pains alongside nervous butterflies, the warmth of a hug, and belly laughs.

He contained his glory to work-worn hands and dust-covered feet. To bone-heavy weariness and wide-eyed wonder. He tabernacled among us, as us. He became deeply acquainted with what it is to be human, to exist in the body he co-created and called good at its inception. Contained to all of its beauty, and all of its brokenness.

November 23, 2024

It’s exactly 2:26:47…48…49…and counting AM. How do I know this? The children’s hospital seems to be playing some kind of cruel joke to have the time ticking second-by-second glaring down at me from the TV screen across the room. I’m sure I could attempt to change it, but I’m currently nap trapped by a very sleepy baby girl who refuses to rest anywhere but mama’s arms right now. I don’t blame her. After the whirlwind event of the day I’d be cuddled up in my mama’s lap alongside her if I could.

Chloe (my 5 month old) began showing symptoms a couple of days ago. Beginning with increased fussiness that escalated to vomiting. When she woke up this morning (I guess technically yesterday morning, thank you torture clock) she had been unable to keep her feeds down for a bit and was starting to vomit yellow. Concerned, especially because of her age, we decided to take her to the emergency room to get evaluated.

I was fully expecting to be told it was viral, to have her be given some nausea medicine and IV fluids then be sent on our way to ride out the rest of the sickness at home. What I didn’t expect was the for the ultrasound to show her right ovary 4x the size of her left. Her ovary had completely twisted over itself and was cutting off its blood supply causing the pain that was making her vomit.

This meant surgery.

Nothing can prepare you to watch your baby get poked and prodded and eventually wheeled away behind closed doors to be put to sleep, intubated and cut open. It’s heartbreaking and feels so wrong. Thankfully, as far as 2:50:37…38…39…etc AM. she appears to be recovering well. They were able to untwist her ovary and now we wait to see how it heals, if it heals. There is a chance it was too late and that the ovary won’t recover, but we are praying and believing for complete healing. Only time will tell.

It’s one thing to experience your own health issues, but to watch your child sick, struggle and in pain is really, really hard.

We are currently sharing our recovery room with another patient. She is in her teens and her mom is now seated like a sentry the same as I am, keeping watch over her daughter while she sleeps. This makes me realize that it will never get any easier watching your child go through sickness, pain or suffering.

“God, can I trust you with my child’s body?”

It was amongst the moonlit drenched olive trees where a Son made his final plea to his Father. He prayed in agony, “…If it is possible, let this cup of suffering be taken away from me (Matt 26:39a).” It would be only hours from Jesus’s plea in the garden before he would drink deeply of this cup of suffering— enduring ridicule, slander, betrayal, flogging, crucifixion and ultimately death.

As we hold the hands of our loved ones fighting disease. As we sit in hospital waiting rooms anticipating results. As we wade through the valleys of mental illness with friends and family. While we sit like sentries keeping watch over our babies as they lie hooked up to monitors and machines. May we experience the nearness of a God that knows the weight, the grief, and the ache for all things wrong to be made right. For God knows what it is to watch a child unjustly suffer in their body. He endured watching his Son take on the sins of the world that he so loved. To sacrifice his body and his life that we might have life and healing in him.

October 5, 2024

We moved from Federal Way to Seattle around this time last year. During the years we spent in the south-end I battled through crippling gut health issues and subsequent anxiety. It was a vicious cycle. Everything I ate went straight through me with an urgency that’s hard to explain if you’ve never experienced it yourself. I fought through agoraphobia for a while— struggling to step past the threshold of our home due to the fear of quite literally pooping myself.

Attempting to do ordinary things like grocery shopping or taking my toddler to the park would send my body into fight or flight. Anxiety attacks were common place. Although I struggled immensely during this time to go many places, there is one place I always pushed myself to make it to every week— that place was church.

We lived no more than seven minutes from our church, but most Sundays that seven minute drive was a battle like you wouldn’t believe. I would spend the drive in tears, praying constantly and speaking 2 Timothy 1:71 over my body and mind. Hoping that I would make it without an accident. I wrestled every week to get in God’s presence alongside God’s people. And every week he was faithful to help me get there.

Currently I’m driving from our now home in Seattle to a friend’s baby shower in Federal Way (a forty-five minute drive). Happening upon the same road I wept and prayed to make it those seven minutes down two years ago. Today, these tears are of gratefulness and thanksgiving. I still struggle with my gut more days than I’d like and am continuing to pray for complete and total healing, but THANK GOD I’m not where I once was.

It was hard to have hope in the midst of the valley. Where my body seemed so against me, but God has been faithful to walk with me through. He was present with me two years ago in my sickness and fears, the same as he is with me today as I walk in continued healing.

“God, thank you for carrying me through and for caring about my body.”

Two years ago, I (illegally) captured this photo while praying and struggling through that seven minute drive. Although I was in the middle of my storm, it felt like such a prophetic image of God’s faithfulness. That driving toward the light, one day I’d see sunny days again. and when I would look back on this season of storm and struggle I’d see the promise of God’s nearness and faithfulness in the midst of it all.

It can be both a blessing and a curse to belong to a body. To exist in one is to know both great joy and immense pain, health and pleasure alongside sickness and disease, and beauty beside suffering. Our bodies were made good, but sin has inflicted havoc on every cell— dooming us to death.

But then came Christmas. The day we anticipate and celebrate all December long. When the Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. Immanuel— God with us.

Jesus laid down his Godly rights and advantages and he contained himself to our frail form. He entered this world lowly and humble, with small and needy hands reaching out and dependent on human parents to care for and raise him. In his life here on earth he suffered greatly in his body. He was, “a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief (Is. 53:3).” He knew pain. He knew sickness. He knew the corrupted state of our flesh. And so, he died to redeem it. The same hands that sought comfort from the manger in a small stable in Bethlehem would one day be nailed to the cross on Calvary, for you and for me.

Isaiah puts it this way:

Surely he took up our pain
and bore our suffering,
yet we considered him punished by God,
stricken by him, and afflicted.
But he was pierced for our transgressions,
he was crushed for our iniquities;
the punishment that brought us peace was on him,
and by his wounds we are healed.
Isaiah 53:4-5

His body was broken for our broken bodies.

Here on earth our bodies will see decay and taste of death, but because of what Jesus did on the cross we now have this promise of new life and new bodies. Paul writes in Corinthians2 that “we will have a house in heaven, an eternal body made for us by God himself” where “these dying bodies (that we now inhabit) will be swallowed up by life.” He goes on to say that although we groan and grow weary while bound to these earthly bodies, that we can still remain confident—“For we live by believing and not by seeing.” And in the meantime, while we wade through all the beauty and suffering our bodies bestow, our goal remains the same— to please him.

Jesus was born in a body and he was resurrected in the same one. He bears the scars of suffering and redemption on his body— with nail pierced hands, feet and side. He has been glorified in his body and is seated at the right hand of his Father in heaven. He did not disregard his skin and bones once death was defeated. No, the Word took on flesh, forever. From heaven to dust to dust glorified and made new.
God can be trusted with our bodies.

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Grown by Grace

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