CONVERSATIONS WITH GOD:

I pray and I pray and I often write my prayers, and when I am moved to hear an answer, I write that too. Here is the answer I got to my sorrow over this almost-40-year-old-body which is increasingly... well...almost 40.

GOD SPEAKS:

This is beauty. How can you not know that? Every dip and every valley in that skin you stare at so sadly. Those wrinkles, those scars, the bends and kinks in your swelling joints, the fleshy curves at your hips and waist. These are a map, every line and every shading a testament to all the places we have been, you and I together, as I led you on this journey that is your life. 

Did you not know? Do you not see? I am a painter! I paint with oils, thick and deep, mixing, pitting, brushing onto your canvas in colors brilliant and subdued. But it is the textures, the texture which is the key. My medium is not a simple color, flat and 2-dimensional. It encompasses height and weight, the oils thick or thin or sporadic from my brush. This is the beauty of my work. You are an oil painting. How can you long to be flat and smooth and shinny as you were?

I am a painter. Is a blank canvas the beauty that you crave?

I created you long ago, a blank canvas, as I create many whom I love. As any painter, I love a canvas, blank and white. To see it there fills me with excitement, with joy. It fills me with love. 

Do you think that this love comes from the whiteness of the canvas? Should I hang it then, on my wall as it is, unmarred, untouched, smooth and sleek? Would I love it if I did? No. What I love is not not the canvas. It is the potential, the excitement of the creation which is to come. Do you think this love, this joy would exist if I did not paint? If I did not intend, anticipate something better that is to come, something better than the smooth surface and bright, perfect face? 

Upon you, once a blank canvas, I have created. I have practiced the glory of creation. Each brushstroke has added texture, color, form. I have added, every day for forty years, another layer, another dip and valley, here and there, and your body has changed with my brush, colored and deepened, textured and shaded. 

Your wrinkles are deeper, the lines in your skin are longer and more pronounced. Your hands are rough and calloused. There is a scar bellow your right wrist. Smaller scars and transient cuts mar your arms. There are freckles here and there. Is that a sun spot beginning to appear?

Your face is rounder, fleshy. That slim jaw has gone. Under your eyes the skin is puffy. Your hair is cut short in deference to ease, though a longer style gave it more lift and grace. You no longer spend your money or your time on complex styles. You leave it straight and fine, the way I made it, though you do not think this suits your face as well. Your stomach isn’t flat, your hips bulge and your waist line is thick. Your skin is pitted and dimply where once it was smooth as silk. Your feet have bunions and your toes have gone crooked with arthritis and hard walking over the years.  

You look in the mirror, standing naked before God, and your eyes tear up and your shoulders slump. You turn this way and that. You look hopefully for something you don’t see. You sigh and turn away. You resolve to accept that your beauty is gone, to settle for a lesser standard and be happy with what you’ve got. 

But don’t you know? This is my masterpiece. Not that twenty-year-old in high heals and a size six dress. Not that perfect doll with the make-up and the blow-dried hair. She was just a canvas, half created, exciting and beautiful not for her own sake, but for all the potential of what she would become. 

How can you compare yourself to her and find yourself lacking? You with all the richness and texture of age. You whom my brushstrokes, my artist’s eye has created. You are the painting with all its texture and depth, its shades and complexities that a true painter can rejoice in. How can you long to be again that blank canvas, void of creation, without my genius upon you? How can you reject the true work of my artist’s self, calling instead for the shallow outline of a mere idea? A half-formed sketch.

You are my masterpiece. My work of art with depth and color and texture to claim. You are a woman, and your every curve and dent and flaw serve only to richen the painting that I am creating out of you. 

Stand again, naked before me. Know that every curve and every sag comes from my artist’s brush, every scar is my tone and texture upon you. Stand naked before me, someday, without those tears, without that sigh. And see my masterpiece for what it is - glory and beauty and genius and creation, all wrapped into one. Not lacking, never less. So much more than you were before.

What do you say to someone who has just disclosed to you that their life is a constant struggle with pain and illness?

You are talking with a casual friend; you just met someone and are hearing about their life; you ask a question of an acquaintance and it leads to raw details you didn’t expect. You are uncomfortable and wish you could get away. or you are moved to really care and want to say something that will make their pain less. 

What do you say? 

How do you respond? 

COMMON ANSWER ONE: “It’s going to be alright.” “Everything will get better.” “You’ll be doing better soon.”

Assurance that everything is going to be alright is okay for close friends and family who have lived this illness with me day after day and changed their lives to help me through. It is not an appropriate response from a new acquaintance or a friend whom I don’t regularly share the intimate parts of my life with. And with this kind of response, even the intimate friends probably need to watch out.

In most situations and from most people, such a response is designed to make you (the speaker) feel better, not me. You may think that your desire to reassure me that everything will be alright comes out of the burning compassion and love you feel for me when you hear how difficult things are in my life. But most of the time, those words actually come from your desire to alleviate the discomfort you feel at my pain. It is uncomfortable, even intolerable, for you to think of me suffering, day after day with no reprieve. You want to force all the loss and pain that makes up my life not to be true, or, at the least, not to be true much longer. You grope around for some way to do that, and what you come up with is, “Its not that bad, it will be okay.”

The truth is, it probably will be okay. Because I am a strong person who can find a way to love my life no matter how painful the path I am given. But that doesn’t mean it is not “that” bad. It is every bit “that” bad. I’m just every bit that strong. 

And no matter whether I’m okay or not, the fact is, you have no way of knowing whether I will be okay or not. You have no way of knowing whether I will break under the pain of things or whether my body will continue to deteriorate until I cannot walk or go to the bathroom by myself or speak clearly anymore.  You have no way of knowing whether my pain will increase until I am unable to bear it, or I will become too weak to lift my head off my pillow, whether I will gain weight uncontrollably, become ugly and develop neurological twitches which people will stare at in public. All of these things are possible and the reality of my life is that I have to consider them, worry about them, be aware of them, every day. 

Assuring me that these things wont happen (“Things will get better.”) is offensive, infuriating, and a slap in the face to me.

The most offensive thing about this response is that I know it isn’t true and I wonder if you think I am nieve enough to consider believing these words just because you said them. The next most offensive things is that you would presume to assume that you could know such a complex answer as how this illness will progress better than I do when I have lived with it every day of my life.

The truth is, I know that you have less ability than me to predict what will happen with this illness. Deciding to blindly believe it will all be alright is a way for you to decide not to have to live with any part of one of the hardest aspects of such an illness - uncertainty about the future. I am certainly not going to be saved from this torturous concern abut what direction my health will take as I age. But here you are, asking me to participate in a lie to help make you more comfortable with this unknown - to help you sleep better at night. And I am offended to be used this way. I am not sure why I have to lie about my life to make it easier for you to be comfortable. 

If you are a doctor and you have tested me and done research and found reason to believe that I wont get any worse, then by all means, tell me. I’ll be relieved to hear it. But if you are not, don’t you dare tell me that everything is going to be alright. Don’t you dare tell me I will get better, that the worst wont happen. You are only convincing yourself. Convincing yourself that I feel better (that I believe you) makes you feel better, eases the horrible feelings your caring for me causes when you see what I am having to deal with in my life. 

Its a betrayal of me.

Its a betrayal because it shuts down my right to be honest about my life. It is the same as telling me that what I experience isn’t true. I know that the reality of my situation is that my future is much more uncertain than most, that this illness could and often does get much worse. I have to deal with that every day. Denying that this is true, telling me that somehow you know the future (when you don’t) and that I am not in danger (when I am) not only makes me feel alone in my (very real) fears, it also makes me feel crazy. Because I have learned enough about this illness, known enough other people who have had it, lived with its changes over enough years, that I know the risk is real. This fear is a part of my every day. And here you are, telling me that it isn’t necessary, when I know that it is. Am I crazy, or are you?

If you can’t bear to know what my life is like, if you just need to get away from hearing about it, have the guts to own your own weakness and tell me so. Say, “I really don’t want to hear any more about this. This is too uncomfortable for me to deal with.” I’ll probably loose respect for you. But I’ll recognize that the problem is in you. I wont have to doubt my own judgments, my own competence, because something you said (which sounded so reasonable and positive) clashed at a basic level with what I know to be true (that this illness could get worse, that my life may not get better). 

Unless you come offering me a cure - a medical cure - you have no place predicting how this illness will progress. And no matter who you are and what you’ve lived with, you have no right to discount the pain that living with this illness entails for me. 

It is not your place to tell me everything will be alright. 

So - what can you say? 

You’ve just gotten to know someone who revealed to you that their life is a constant struggle with pain and illness every day. What is the appropriate thing to say?

Try, “Wow. I’m really sorry you have to deal with that.”

Try, “That’s terrible.”

Try, “I really hope things get better for you.”

Try, “I had no idea.” or “I can’t imagine how hard that must be.” or “You are clearly a strong person to have gotten this far with all of that to deal with.”

Don’t add, “And so I know you’ll be alright.”

Don’t add, “I am sure things will get better.”

You can say, “I hope tomorrow’s better.” or “Is there anything I can do?” or just, “I’m sorry.”

Just don’t try to change it (because you can’t). And don’t try to deny it (because I can’t). Acknowledge it and let it be.

You would be surprised what a powerful difference it makes in my life to have someone look my pain in the eye, acknowledge it, and not try to brush it away.