Writing at the intersection of life, chronic illness, and Christian faith.
Writing
It's been a week
And I don't know myself anymore
But the doors to your home are unlocked
And I test them with shame high in my throat
Ligaments stretch to connect
And my faith that you are still the same, good God
Patterns the day out in front of me.
Is this how it was for Jesus
Sometimes
When he went out to pray,
That you felt so far away
But he knew in his bones
You remained the same?
The problem with my voice
Is that it doesn't know what it wants to talk about.
I look within
And simply hear
A pleasant hum.
Why do the hard things?
Because some can't.
Because I don't want to be flabby
And I don't want to be bored.
I don't know how you did it
Meaning
I can't retrace
The pathways within myself that you used
To change me.
I am a sinner. I have been afflicted with a deadly wound. It will claim me. Without some miraculous intervention, I am done for.
My wife and I have prayed for a long time that I'd be healed. And despite all that, it'd be hard to say I'm much better.
I don’t know you, but I love you. I love you with a very small part of the love that God has for you: a love that bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
You are in a room occupied by innumerable wheels, levers, switches, knobs, and pedals. The lowly conductor, you press and spin, twiddle and turn, wipe the sweat from your brow, damn the luck, and press some more.
Health
During the onset of my illness I was working at Amazon. I served in various roles over the course of six years, but they all had one thing in common: high pressure to perform with unclear expectations.
In my last post, I talked about how bad I'd been feeling, and I postulated a few factors that might be contributing to that: exercise, diet, exertion, general sickness cycles, etc. Well, there was another factor I wasn't considering at the time.
Today provided me the unfortunate opportunity to document "a day in the life" of my symptoms.
Late in 2019, I was diagnosed with chronic Lyme disease after a five-year journey through a labyrinth of doctors and diagnoses.
One of the things you get to do when you're a chronically ill tech worker is create data about your illness!