You look at a whole lot of things differently and sense that others are looking at you differently when you unexpectedly become sick. You find those around you wondering, “Is he really sick? Is he a hypochondriac? Does he want to be sick? He was always so intense, I knew that this would happen! He is unhappy in his state in life! He is simply looking for attention and sympathy! There is something he cannot face!”
You pick up the reactions, and soon you begin to ask yourself the same things. It all gets frightening because you do not know the answers and, deep down, you sense that any or all of those things could be true. We are pretty complex critters! The physical illness is not all that serious, but you get pretty serious.
Initially, the symptoms are all bad: self-pity, anger at friends, impatience with everything. Your old confidence and strength is gone. At this stage, you are genuinely ill, though the physical illness has been mostly lost in the new emotional lesions. But things slowly change, the scars disappear; first the physical ones, and, later, much more slowly, the emotional ones. You feel strength again, and old friends and old circles begin to open up again.
Health returns, but it is different. Some of the old self-confidence is gone, replaced by a new sense of vulnerability and relativity that is immensely freeing. You realize more clearly what is a gift and what is earned. You know that you, on your own, cannot guarantee your own health, nor your attractiveness and desirability in love and friendship.
You begin to beg for conversion because you would want to transvaluate all your values and prioritize your whole self and life anew. Even so, you know you are still a long way from home. There is still a lot of turf between you and the promised land. But, like Moses and Abraham, you have been given a “glimpse from afar.” When one is wandering in a wilderness, it is helpful to know in what direction the milk and honey lie. You will still spend most of your life wandering, wondering how to enter the promised land. But with an anonymous poet from the past, you realize that God is finally taking you in hand:
I asked for strength that I might achieve;
I was made weak, that I might learn humbly to obey.
I asked for health, that I might do greater things;
I was given infirmity, that I might do better things.
I asked for riches, that I might be happy;
I was given poverty, that I might be free…
I asked for power, that I might have praise from men;
I was given weakness, that I might feel the need for God.
I asked for all things that I might enjoy life;
I was given life that I might enjoy all things.
I got nothing I asked for, but everything that I had hoped for.
[Excerpt from Ron Rolheiser’s “Weakness Leads to Strength,” July 1983]
