“Swish!” The sharp, boxy machine sucks in a gulp of air and sends it erupting into a strong stream of gurgling water bubbles before sending it whisking up the plasticky tubing and into my nostrils. Brief spikes of pain take turns blazing up each of my legs, the depth of them an ache that feels like my bones are shattering.
I roll to my other side and tuck the heating pad back around my hips and thighs, trying to find some relief, and the effort of moving sucks the air from my lungs and leaves me gasping for each next breath like I’ve just run a marathon. Irritated, I reach for the pressurized mask of my ventilator and slip it over my nose and mouth. The rhythmic breaths it provides offers relief.
Sometimes hope is difficult to find in the lonely hours around 3am. The silent dark seems just the right habitat for all the doubts and big questions to seep into my soul and look for places to take root. I cry out to a God who at that moment feels very far away. “Can’t we just skip to the good stuff talked about in Revelation 21? God living with us. Death no more. Pain, grief, and crying a thing of the past?”
As I’m lamenting over my pain and isolation and how tired I am from these pain-filled nights, my thoughts are suddenly turned to the many stories I’ve heard and read of saints before me who suffered immeasurable losses and bore unthinkable burdens and didn’t whine or complain, but counted it all joy. I picture all of the men and women who have chosen to remain in hostile places to share the good news of Jesus, and suddenly my own resilience seems very soft.
I cry out for a bigger capacity to suffer well, with only joy, to make me tough, yet keep me tender, and to loosen my grip on my meaningless earthly treasures. God is gracious in His gentleness with me. He doesn’t mind being with me in my weakness, and He has written a good story for my life that He will see to completion.
So tonight in the lonely stretches of battling big pain, He gathers me into His arms and carries me through a room crowded with sorrows so that I can take up this cross again and deny myself, following Him down a road I never would have chosen for myself, but that leads to fulfilling and eternal life.
Choosing Hope 
Dear Sweet Hannah…I cannot even begin to comprehend your suffering and am praying for relief. It is so evident that your faith in God is what is sustaining you and that He is faithful and never leaves. Sending hugs, prayers and much love. ❤️
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Thank you, my sweet friend.
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Hannah, I wish I could sit up with you in the quiet of some pain filled night. Just sit. The best I can do from here is to let you know that when I awaken in the night, I will be thinking of you and offering a prayer to our Father who sustains us all. God bless you today and every day.
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Thank you so much Kim!
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Even in such pain, you paint such beautifully compelling imagery with your pen. May your heavenly Father bless you with joyful revelation as you wait in Him.
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Thank you Dawn!
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I am praying for you, prayers for comfort, pain relief, and strength. 🙏🌺
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Thank you Jeanne!
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Oh Hannah,
I’m not sure whether to cry in sympathy or rejoice at the depth of your insight and the strength of your faith. May the Lord Jesus continue to strengthen and sustain you and may He continue to grant you the victory, by His grace.
I cannot know all of what you are going through, and you have walked much further down the road of pain and loss than I have, yet I humbly share a poetic lament that I wrote some time ago that reflects of little of what you have expressed here, in the hope that you may take some small comfort in it, as I have. I’m just pasting the original post in its entirety below, so please forgive the formatting. It’s entitled, “Where Hopes Lie.”
God bless you, Hannah! He loves us more than we can fathom.
———————
“Where Hopes Lie (A Lament)”
I never knew, how my hopes grew,
so silently they spread.
Like ivy leaves on chimney wall
they grew inside my head.
Until the bitter breezes blew,
and left them all for dead.
I felt them shrivel up and fall,
and it was then I knew,
that down inside my hopes had died,
and they were mine
no more.
Whole fleets of expectations,
like hungry merchant ships,
had sailed into my harbor heart,
and docked among the slips.
They’d tied themselves with sailor’s art
to wait their promised store.
And when, with hulls still empty,
they were ordered to depart,
they rose in bloody mutiny
and stormed upon the shore.
Oh how they wailed,
and loud their cries
for longings unfulfilled,
as vacant satisfaction’s lies
slipped through their hands
like desert sands,
to lie
upon the floor.
Enough.
Delib’rately
I turn my eyes
away from where
lament was spent,
and to the place my certain home
lies high above the skies,
where moth and rust do not destroy
and thieves can steal
no more.
The kingdom of the Righteous One,
whose lips can form no lies,
prepares for me a mansion, grand,
and beckons me with outstretched hand
up where ev’ry shattered hope
becomes a bright kaleidoscope,
there stands, for me,
an open door.
“See, I have placed before you an open door that no one can shut. I know that you have little strength, yet you have kept my word and have not denied my name.”
The Revelation of Jesus Christ, Chapter 3, Verse 8
——————–
Postscript:
I remember the simple joy of having a meal at a restaurant with my wife. It is a pleasure I last enjoyed 9 years ago and in all likelihood will never know again this side of eternity. And so many other things – driving a car, walking in a park, going to stores, traveling to visit loved ones, and countless other little things are now big things, since I have lost them all.
And there is so much I had grown to expect, without ever giving the expectations a second thought, because they were so, well, ordinary. Now I see them at every turn – on social media, the internet, etc., and have to resist the tendency to say to myself, “you will never be able to…” and lapse into self-pity – perhaps the deadliest and most prevalent of sins.
It is only right and proper to grieve our losses, and to mourn over that which once was, and is no more. We must do so if we are ever to continue to truly live, lest we fall into bitterness and our life fall into decay, and our soul fall into ruin. Yet, at some point, a point unique to each person and each loss, we must make the deliberate effort to pivot from our grieving and our mourning and to begin to look forward to the hopes that yet may be. Thus is born the poetry of “lament.”
It has taken me many years to be able to write this lament for the life that I lost (and the better part of a year to publish it), and I don’t suppose I will ever be “over it,” and I know that from time to time I will be revisiting the harbor of my former hopes, but by the Lord’s grace I have begun to accept and to look beyond, and my eye has been refined to look for the eternal, even among the temporal, for it is only the eternal which will endure.
Dear reader, perhaps you have suffered your own losses, losses which are too hard to bear. Please know that you are not alone in this, and there is One who understands better than anyone else, and who calls you to come to Him for comfort, for forgiveness, for hope everlasting, and for life eternal. His name is Jesus Christ – “a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief.” He is the Son of God. His kingdom is a kingdom of righteousness, where grief and death will have no quarter. He took your sins upon himself, died, and rose again that you might come to him. He’s calling your name.
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This is so beautiful, Craig. Lament is a lost language, but it is so therapeutic in the seasons of grief. I’m sorry for the hard that you have and are walking through. Thank you for you vulnerability in sharing this with me. It blessed me, and I know it will others too.
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Hannah, your words are so deep and powerful. God is using you in ways you will not realize until heaven. Thank you for being a pliable servant in His hand, terribly hard as it is. May you feel God’s arms under you during the long painful nights.
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Thank you so much for your encouragement, Patty!
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