When Your Heart Feels Squeezed

 These are the days I walk around seeing life with new and different eyes. They are eyes bathed in the furnace of suffering, with understanding unobtained before now. 

Those dreaded words landed like a thud: "They discovered cancer." My Mom has been diagnosed with Small Cell Lung Cancer, typically a cancer only seen in smokers or their partners. It feels heavy and dark, and menacing and cruel, and so many other things that words don't seem to describe. 

(Taking Mom to the hospital in Arkansas with my sister)

It is one thing to hear about it. And to feel sad. To think on it. To learn of it. To wonder where this goes - typically nowhere good, except, I suppose, heaven. Heaven is good. I'm okay with the heaven part. It's the process of getting there that somehow unnerves me.

I've had little fear of death in my life. God gives us these years, some more, some less, and we must reckon with the undeniable reality that 100% of people die. The statistic stares us blankly in the face, and we say it's undeniable, and we pretend to reckon with this fact, but in reality, we seem to work very hard to deny it. 'Who says it's undeniable?! Not I! I will live with a total denial of the reality of death!' At least, I think that's what many, if not most of us seem to act like, truth be told.

We have years of living to do things. You know, meander through life, find friends, community, 'live, laugh, love' - all that. And sometimes the things we do aren't so great, like get sucked into mind-numbing distraction and fritter years away with the meaningless. And yet, I believe there's life in that too. God isn't absent from our distractions. From our living in denial of death. I'm sure He's there in it with us, sometimes whispering oh so gently (and other times, oh, so loudly), "It is appointed unto man to die once." (Thank God, it's not twice!) There are many things God tells us. Even in the things we do to avoid hearing...Let me play with my dog! And I see the dog wag his tail, and I'm reminded of the life in this creature. And I think, 'This dog won't live forever.' And I'm sad. And my heart is squeezed. But I don't want to think of that just now.

So I watch a movie. And a character in the movie faces danger. Oh, yeah, there's danger in life. I almost forgot. Let's not think of that just now. And my heart is squeezed.

And then I text a friend. And my friend tells me of her losses. And I listen and am still. I breathe a sigh. I don't want to think about this. Maybe I'll read a book.

And I read a book and I'm challenged to think about the cycles of life. And I think, 'Let me read something less deep, something lighthearted.' And I push out the thoughts of the reality of death. 

Let's have our lives filled with butterflies and sunshine.

Let's just pretend we won't face that final journey to our eternal home. It just seems all too difficult.

It's in these reckonings that I find my heart tight in my chest. Like rubber-bands have been placed round my ribcage. Like if I just stop breathing for a while I can ignore the suffering around me. I witnessed suffering, and I want to run and hide.

But I sit with people in suffering! I'm a loving presence to those in their time of need! I have gifts in this! These are the things I remind myself.

And I realize I have only scratched the surface of knowledge of true suffering. I've felt it in my own flesh, from assaults, from illness, from pains and chronic illness. I've suffered in my mind, in my soul, in my spirit. I've felt this deep sting of suffering, and I can bear up under it, in it and through it. But to witness it in others...this is an entirely different territory. It's where my heart feels the squeeze.

Can I trust in these moments that God is with the sufferer too? It is hard to trust.

I wince in the presence of pain. It's as if I feel it in myself. 

I think it's because it's my mother, I tell myself. And perhaps that is so.

I wish for her peace, for her pain to dissipate, for her suffering to be relieved. I pray for her healing, for her strength, for her hope. 

And as I pray I lift my squeezed heart and say, 'Here God, You've got to take this. It's going to explode. I cannot carry my squeezed heart anymore.'  

I can tell all the recent journeys I've made. Of the increased burden of caregiving, that I didn't sign up for. It lands on us at times. We don't exactly choose our lot in life.

I can tell the miseries, the difficulties. I can walk you through what it's like. But that would never do. There's no way to let you walk in my shoes. God will bring you to your own experience of suffering - yours and others. It is unavoidable. 

Your heart may be squeezed. And you'd think I'd have some special thing to say, 'Here's what to do with that!' And I don't. Because your heart is going to be squeezed and there is no way out. And that's exactly the point. If you could simply make the squeezed-ness go away, you'd figure it out in an instant. It is an insufferable feeling. A heartache. A soul-ache. An 'I can't handle this!' headache.

(My heart felt squeezed as I sat on the plane to head home after getting my Mom to Arkansas for cancer treatment)

Is there a way through? I know the answer: of course there is. I'm not going to sit here and write about relying on the promises of God (it's a good idea, for sure). I'm not going to sit and tell you to start practicing gratitude more (that's a great thing to do, of course). 

I'm just going to say this simply: the time your heart is squeezed is a time of discovery of the richness of the presence of God. It is a soul-deepening time. A time to harvest and draw from the riches you've already mined of treasure in Who God is.

And how that looks is going to be unique to you. 

I know for me, my heart has been squeezed recently, and all I can do is fall helpless into the arms of God and say, 'I need You, here, now, in this moment. I. NEED. YOU.'

And that's really where I'm at right now. Welcome to my world.