It’s my fourteenth wedding anniversary, and Amber and I are hundreds of miles apart. I am in the Ozark autumn, sitting in the back yard under the browning broad leaves of a massive American sycamore, watching as Isaac, Jude, and Ian play tag. Amber is with Titus in Minnesota. This is not the romantic anniversary celebration I would have imagined at the beginning of this year.
At the Mayo Clinic, Amber and Titus meet with various doctors—endocrinologists, neurologists, immunologists, and geneticists. They are looking for the unnamed malady at the root of Titus’s failure to thrive, a phrase we’re hearing a lot these days.
Failure to thrive is loaded with meaning. Failure is such a defeating word. Even at this young age, Titus is saddled with it; he cannot conjure success at the simplest thing for most Americans: fattening up. The sweet ladies at church are forever telling us to send him home with them. They will feed him boiled meat and fried pies and whole milk, they say. We’ve tried these things, we tell them, and they laugh and respond, “But he’s never had my pies.”
It’s annoying.
Titus has confounded us, the sweet church ladies, a local medical staff, and a regional medical staff. Today is a hopeful day, though. Today, Titus and Amber are in the land of what Amber calls the Nor-people (she calls them this on account of their distinct Norwegian features: blond hair, square shoulders, and polite manners), people with a knack for making a go of it in harsh conditions. It’s fitting that they’ve grown a state-of-the-art medical facility there, one that specializes in solving the most difficult conditions. We’re hopeful that we’ll finally get some answers.
Amber calls, says that this morning a neurologist spent almost an hour with Titus before declaring him to be well-adjusted and cognitively sound. The doctor reckoned that perhaps his brain malformation isn’t quite as bad as the good folks in Arkansas might think, and in any event, it is improbable that it has any effect on his ability to thrive. Perhaps the geneticist, immunologist, or gastroenterologist will come up with some better answer, Amber says. This seems to be the way of our world. Visit the doctor only to be told that, yes, there is a problem, but no, there aren’t any clear solutions.
I can hear the exhaustion in Amber’s voice. She and Titus are out of their element, trapped in a series of sterile rooms and labs all connected by underground tunnels so that one isn’t required to brave the negative temperatures of a Minnesota winter. Titus is itching to play, as any two-year-old would, and all these rooms and tunnels have made him cagier. Amber says Titus is a ball of energy—maybe too much. He is like a mouse in a maze, or a ping-pong ball bouncing from wall to wall, Amber says.
Titus is the smallest ball of joy. He is a vivacious child. If he were not, this process would be even more maddening.
Last night I sat alone in my bed, upright and drawing the shades on the day with a bit of Scripture and prayer. I read Paul’s letter to the Romans: “For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the freedom and glory of the children of God. We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time. Not only so, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption to sonship, the redemption of our bodies” (Rom. 8:20–23).
The stomach of the world churns. We all live in the maddening groan. If we sit in the silence long enough, if we listen, we hear it. The patina of the Ozark summer before the leaves brown and fall, the thick snow blanket of the dead Minnesota winter, the quaking of the fault lines—these are all the sounds of groaning for redemption.
We also, brothers and sisters to all creation, groan. The failing health of an Arkansas toddler, the slipping mind of the aging parent with dementia, the gray hairs that come in the dealing with toddlers and parents alike—these are sure signs that every cell within us groans.
Jesus groaned in the garden too. Isn’t it ironic? The Great Reconciler himself asking to forego the very act that would bring reconciliation? He wanting redemption by some other purchase? How do we handle that? He too was fully human.
The mystery deepens and deepens.
I consider Jesus in Gethsemane. Lord, if it be your will, let this cup pass. It is the most human prayer of Jesus, I think. It is the bend-low before God, the stinging sweat prayer where Jesus says, “If you could spare me a favor, I’d rather not endure this.” I consider his prayer of self-preservation; if his request had been granted, what of this groaning creation? Would we still have been united with God, rescued from the slavery and corruption of the world? Or would we have groaned and groaned and groaned into and throughout eternity?
In his humanity, though, Jesus learned to bend his will to God’s so that he could be the ultimate agent of reconciliation. He surrendered to the mystery of God’s will, that he would be crucified, murdered, and that his murder would somehow bring a better way.
To ask for relief from God—this is human. To pray through the pain, to live in it instead of numbing yourself to it, to subjugate your will to the will of God, even in the face of potential suffering—this is what it means to be like Jesus. This is what it means to yield to the mystery.
I consider Titus again and feel the acute point of pain, hear the groaning rising in my guts. I quiet my questions, still my mind, and let a simple petition fly: Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, heal my son. We are all groaning for the redemption of Titus’s body in the here and now. Cure him like you did the woman of faith and Jairus’s daughter.
I pause and listen, and hearing nothing, I pray again.
Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, heal my son.
“No,” comes the voice, “at least not like you think.” The Spirit in this moment is less like a small whisper and more like a jarring foghorn.
That’s it. There is no more nuance to the statement, no additional explanation. It is a simple denial, almost terse, and this is the moment I best understand my Catholic friends’ notion of purgatory. I am high-centered on the tension wire between death and resurrection.
It bears admitting—this word from God could be nothing more than the tired mind playing tricks. I have not slept well these past few nights without Amber, and the stress of being away from Titus while he’s being treated nags. In moments like these, psychologists and friends alike remind us that our noggins can be deceptive, give us mirages of answers instead of answers themselves. This is why our more conservative, systematic brothers in faith tell us not to trust listening prayers. There is a danger that one might conflate the voice of God with your own, they say, and I am not naïve to this. This, some believe, is the reason we listen for answers only and always through the Scriptures, never through the still small voices that speak to us in the night. I find this notion ironic. No one ever has misread, misheard, and misapplied a passage of Scripture and claimed it as an answer to the burning questions of the day, right? But these systems, the rigid understandings of prayer and meditation only ever led me to a great internal conflict, to denying my earliest childlike faith, which knew a more intimate creator.
Yes, the systematizers warn us, “Do not trust the voices in your head.” You’ve heard this too. But what if the answers in your head are the voice of God himself? What if they square with circumstance and Scripture, or do not contradict them? What if they are confirmed by your community and all the world around you?
I sat upright in my bed and prayed with expectation. I waited for an answer, begged for one, really. All I heard was a stark answer. It was not the word I had hoped to hear. Truth be told, I’m not sure I hoped to hear anything. Nonetheless, it was a word, forceful but true.
I have been dry for fifty-three days, and fifty-four days ago, approaching God to ask for healing would have spun me by the spoke until I fell headlong into the bottle. Fifty-four days ago, I would have drowned the question and its potential pain in a highball with gin and rocks. But today even this most feared word in answer does not bring fire to my skin.
This, I think, is a little victory.
The prayer, the response, the little victory—perhaps there is another healing at stake here. Perhaps this is the sensation of incremental transformation, or at least its small start.
I am groaning to be made whole too; I know it. Just like Titus and Amber and the broken earth on which we stand. In the dry-sober, I’m learning to listen to this groaning, to sit in it with the great reconciler of it. In the sitting, I’m finding a good word: if I tell you no, but I’m here with you, isn’t that enough? Blessed are those who do not see and still believe. Blessed are you. Today the answer may be no, but in me, all things are forever summed up as yes.
Here I am, in an awkward kind of coming clean. I am watching demons flee into drunk pigs. I will take one thousand divine denials. I’ll live in the groaning. If it means I get to hear God’s clear voice, I’ll subject my will to the mystery of his. I believe that his voice, even in the no, is better than silence.
Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner. Drive out the Gerasenian demons, bend my will around yours, teach me to count your voice as the ultimate gift.