At the End of Yourself Is Grace
When my husband, sons, and I came down with the winter barfing bug this year, there was just one thing on our mind: how to protect the one-year-old. While the nasty norovirus isn’t usually a big deal for older kids and adults, little ones dehydrate quickly.
But here’s the thing: I struggle to ask for help on a good day. Maybe it’s because of my Midwestern childhood; my sisters and I were implicitly taught to be givers of help and not accepters of it. Perhaps it’s my personality type—I’m a go-getter if there ever was one. Whatever the reason, asking for help always feels like an uphill climb. I have to come to the end of myself in order to ask for help.
Doesn’t everyone have enough to deal with without helping me? I wonder. Surely if I tried harder, I wouldn’t need any help ever.
But the stomach flu had a way of bringing me to my knees (literally), so I sent out an SOS to friends without kids, asking if anyone would shelter our tiniest family member. One quickly responded that she’d take little Felicity for the night so we could recover and sanitize.
“Are you sure?” I asked. She was.
One day turned into two as the virus raged, but by the third day we’d managed to bleach the whole house (the only way to kill the virus) and were ready to welcome our girl back home.
She came home healthy and smiling. The worst seemed to be over. We had just settled in for a nap—after sleepless nights, exploding boys, and so much cleaning, I felt wrung out like a dishrag—when I got the text.
Another one bites the dust, my friend wrote. She’d succumbed.
My husband, Daryl, came into the bedroom to find me clutching my phone in tears. I told him our friend and her husband were throwing up.
“I feel terrible,” I said. “I never should have asked anyone to do this. Now they’re suffering just because they were kind to us. How can I fix this?”
“You can’t,” he said. “They knew it was a risk. There’s nothing we can do.”
Our friends remained gracious through it all, but as our little family slowly regained its equilibrium, I struggled with anger and deep sadness.
After a particularly busy and brutal season of Advent, we’d finally curled up for a much-needed staycation, weak and weary, and the very next morning Daryl and I came down with sinus infections. When the antibiotics began to kick those, the stomach flu arrived.
And then the horrible kicker: those who’d shown us mercy ended up suffering, too.
God, we are trying our best to serve you, I prayed. Our friends were being so gracious to help. We could all use a little mercy, here. A little relief.
As we celebrated New Year’s Eve with Gatorade and crackers, I felt in my bones Jill Richardson’s words: “The past year has been hard. Exhausting. It was also valuable and beautiful, but these things often commingle, don’t they?”
When emotion spills over and I struggle to put words to what’s in my heart, the Psalms are a balm. They run the spectrum of human emotion and don’t sanitize the writer’s thoughts before God.
Psalm 10 speaks of God’s presence with those who are suffering because of wickedness or violence. Though this is often read as physical oppression or violence, disease brings evil of its own. The Psalmist begins with a cry of despair:
Why, Lord, do you stand far off? Why do you hide yourself in times of trouble? (Psalm 10:1 NIV)
It’s not wrong to admit when you feel forgotten by God. It isn’t a sign of broken faith to doubt, be angry, or face despair. When we come to the end of ourselves, it isn’t a sign that we’ve failed. It simply means that we’re human, and God has to take it from here. As Alia Joy writes in Glorious Weakness, “Weakness is a holy invitation to allow grace to do its work.”[1]
After pouring out his anguish to the Lord, the psalmist finds new hope, remembering the presence of the Lord all the while:
“But you, God, see the trouble of the afflicted; you consider their grief and take it in hand” (Psalm 10:14 NIV).
I prayed that God would have mercy on our friends, on our home, on our children, on the world. And then I went back to bed, Gatorade in hand. I’d come to the end of myself and received grace. And it was good.
[1] Alia Joy, Glorious Weakness, 163.
is a mom of three, speaker, and author of Uncluttered: Free Your Space, Free Your Schedule, Free Your Soul and serves as a Presbyterian pastor in southern California, alongside her husband, Daryl. You can find her on Twitter, Facebook, or at www.courtneybellis.com.
Photograph © Ernest Brillo, used with permission
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