Morning Glories

But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, "Do it again" to the sun; and every evening, "Do it again" to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them.
-G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

Let me hear in the morning of your steadfast love,
    for in you I trust.
Make me know the way I should go,
    for to you I lift up my soul.
Psalm 143:8

Every weekday morning is the same. I wake up when it gets light or when the upstairs neighbors start moving around. I then roll over and bury my head back in the pillow after glancing at the clock to see how much more sleep I can wring out of the morning.

The alarm goes off at 8 am. I turn it off, knowing it will go off again in 5 minutes. I snuggle deeper in the blankets. After a few more rounds of this, I finally throw the covers back and stumble into the bathroom for a quick shower, the daily baptism into being human for another day. If I was not too tired the night before, I would have laid my clothes out-one less thing to do in the 30 minutes I give myself to get ready and out the door. While I slap on some makeup and use a brief diffuser on my mane, the Husband of the Ages makes a breakfast smoothie of berries, kale, flax, and coconut milk. I’m out the door by 8:47. Ben always walks me to the car and waves me off down the street.

These are my mornings. Made of rituals of squeezing out more rest, delaying the inevitable rise out of delicious cozy sleep and deep blankets. Usually the thought of coffee, “nectar of the gods,” as an old friend called it, is enough to inspire me to thoughts beyond my blankets.

If only every morning included one of these. 

I have never been a morning person. Clearly. I have always enjoyed lounging in bed for hours on weekends, happily drinking coffee or crunching down toast or having an indulgent read in pajamas. All while getting to wake up slowly. Delightful. Life-giving.

The last few years, though, have intensified my lack of enthusiasm for mornings. Along with the usual reluctance, I now face the dreaded aches and pains that fibromyalgia throws at me each morning.

I wake up and take stock of how bad it is
today, curled up and eyes closed still. Mind fogged with sleep, it comes to me in waves of awareness. Damn. Another bad day. The aches pin me down, the deep pains spread through me like branches on a tree. It takes everything in me to move, to throw back those covers, and face the day. When my feet gingerly touch the floor, more aching pains shoot through my feet. Ah. Here we go.

Once I get moving, I can usually keep moving. The hot water, as hot as I can stand it, wakes me up and releases my tight muscles. The concealer under my eyes helps me feel like I don’t look like a cast member of The Walking Dead. Ben’s Wonder Smoothie gets me to have some breakfast when otherwise I would only have coffee.

These routines--simple, yet hard as ice sometimes--prove to me that once again, I can do this. I can do this thing called fibromyalgia. Every day when I get up, knowing my feet will sting and that my body will feel like lead, I am beating it. Every day that I grab my car keys and head to the door, I win. And even on the weekends and evenings when I‘m hard at rest, I am still beating fibromyalgia. I have my evening rituals, too-British murder mysteries, hanging out with friends and family, easy dinners, sometimes a walk around the block or a ride on my stationary bike, working on reading through the top 100 novels list.

All these things help me live life in the middle of figuring out fibroymalgia. Because we all need to find our calms in the storms, eyes in the hurricanes, don’t we? Finding those activities, those routines that make our hearts sing, instilling courage and hope and consistency in the darkest of times, well, that’s when you know the hard things won’t beat you.

Still Allowed to Dream?

The condition fibromyalgia involves systemic pain, particularly soreness in the joints, soft tissues and tendons. The cause of the disorder remains unknown but it primarily affects females between 20 and 50.
-Definition of fibromyalgia, dictionary.com

The Lord is good to those who wait for Him, to the soul who seeks Him.
-Lamentations 3:24-25



I’m 30. I have a chronic pain condition.

Am I still allowed to dream?

These days, I’m tired. I’m in pain. I find that my dreams are small, shrunk by chronic pain, chronic exhaustion. Life feels much smaller, more about existence and survival. I was going to change the world, you know. I was going to do things. I was going to have a life marked by holy activity, sacred busyness. It’s hard not to feel I was promised a life of big things--in my teens and early twenties, life was all about potential. People tell you what you’re good at, what they can see you doing, what subjects you excel in and should pursue. Butcher, baker, candlestick maker-the world is your oyster.  You can be anything you want to be. You can and should be doing Important Things. As a follower of Christ, those Important Things should be all evangelical, mission-oriented, and sometimes full of Dos and Don’ts, Shoulds and Shouldn’t’s, depending on to whom you were listening at the time.

Now that I’m 30, my goals are not quite so lofty.

These days, I usually dream of rest. I dream of enough magical time and space to rest. I long for free time, down time, time enough to maybe just relax enough to feel good again. I go back and forth hoping for healing. Some days I muster up the courage to ask God for healing-to change the new make-up of my head that now processes everything as pain, everything as a deep ache. Most days, I don’t ask Him, so I don’t have to hear “no” again. Because that gets really old. And raises up age-old questions of faith, God’s intentions, and plain old-fashioned patience and trust. Most days, I chalk it all up to a broken world, broken by that terrible and glorious thing called free will; broken by illness and sadness, a world that doesn't readily invite God in. My pastor told me, straight-up, that asking for healing is a trippy experience. It’s just plain weird. But we are told to ask for it, so we must keep asking. Some days, I ask others to pray for me when I just can’t do it for myself.

But I've been starting to wonder if it’s OK to still have big dreams, even though life is clearly a lot more realistic. I’m a lot more aware of my limitations. I wonder that even if I didn't have fibromyalgia, would I still be overwhelmed with life and all its choices? Would I still have enough gumption to have a huge dream, to set a grand goal? To plan out an adventurous life, one that is full of grace and beauty and checking off to-do lists? Because I really like doing that last thing, too. Would I pursue my  beautifully sudden dreams of motherhood? To not be scared off by my miscarriage, to not listen to the fears that I probably wouldn't be a very good mother? Could I still set off towards my dream of writing? To shake off the heavy mountains of excuses, to find the silence and space required? Am I still allowed big dreams, at my age when things should be set, when minds should be made up, when the course of one’s life is already in furious motion? Am I allowed a different life than the one that directly in front of me?

Because I do want a life that is filled to the brim with the goodness of knowing God. I want a life that is full of good fruit from following Him and His words. I want to be saturated in His community, with His people. I want a life where I can recognize and use the talents and skills and personality that He has given me. It’s hard, in the middle of chronic pain, to even see those things. But even this chronic pain can be used for this good life that I so desire. Gary Thomas, author of Sacred Marriage, said so beautifully that while marriage limits what we can do, it multiples what we can become, and I believe that to be true of all the limitations and circumstances we find ourselves in, even something like chronic pain. I am holding on to hope that all things will be redeemed. This is the promise of the Cross. This is the promise that believers in Christ have always held on to. My dreams don’t have to alter; they are good dreams. They might just look different in the daylight.