Wrestling Patience
I am being taught patience.
When my first few kidney stones came around, I struggled to muster the strength to silence the pain in my body. In all of my eight years of life, I had never known the world as such a painful place. I had never known that there are levels of pain that stop your life in its tracks. Those levels of pain that make lights, noises, and even thoughts too much to bear. In this pain, life is still. Slow. Quiet, and excruciatingly loud at the same time. This is both the deepest level of meditation I have ever experienced and the most trying torture. At eight, I was learning to cope with pain. Unbeknownst to me, I was also learning patience. Unfortunately, this variety of patience also requires trust.
By this point in my life, I would estimate that I have passed at least 100 kidney stones. I have not had a routine x-ray come out clear of stones in my recent memory.
When a stone moves around in one of my kidneys, this can result in a frightening amount of pain. The spiky calcified mass rips tissue from my organs with every slight motion. It feels very much like it sounds, except that my brain interprets the pain signals to feel much more like the small calcified stone is a large, spiky, iron ball.
Each episode is deceptive. It begins with pain signaling that makes me think I am nothing more than achy in my abdomen. This quickly progresses into the feeling of having your insides shredded. Thankfully, I have come to know this warning sign because it allows me enough time to follow my pharmaceutical protocol that mitigates the pain. Before I knew this warning sign, and even sometimes now when I miss it, there is no avoiding the pain. Without copious amounts of pharmaceuticals, the pain is paralyzing. This excruciating amount of pain can last anywhere from hours to days, and in certain cases requires me to visit the hospital.
This time is a journey. The first time, you embark without the needed resources. To endure, you need patience and enough trust to get you through. You need to trust that the pain will end at some point, and you need patience to reach the end of the episode. I embarked on this journey with neither, but over time it has given me both. One might think these encounters have strengthened my faith, but instead, it has taught me to trust1that God will deliver me from the depths of my pain. This trust allows me to keep still when I am in pain; it affords me self-control when I would otherwise have none.
I am not a patient person.
Having had formative experiences that were close encounters with death, the dawning of my patience was not intuitive. I was taught quite early that moments of life are precious and are not to be wasted. The introduction of the necessity of patience shook me to my core. Nevertheless, I quickly learned that my need for patience could not be ignored. I would have to endure more pain if my denial of reality prevented me from recognizing the warning signs of a kidney stone on the move.
I thank God for these lessons.
I have learned to thank God for each moment as it comes. Without my most painful moments, I would be further ill-equipped for each subsequent challenge as they have arisen.
Still, my heart breaks.
I never believed in wicked people, and I still don’t. I have an inherent refusal to believe that any part of creation could be inherently wicked. Subsequently, I have come to believe in wicked behavior. The realization of the reality of wicked behavior tends to shatter the realities of optimists.
I have always believed in the good in people. I refuse to believe that any one person lacks a morsel of good in their hearts. I believe there remain marks of creation in people at every life stage, and as such I see God in people; all people. This makes wicked behavior difficult to watch.
I have learned that people can act without an ounce of good intention. I have learned that people can inflict harm on others with no consideration or remorse. I have learned that people can rationalize any behavior to themselves.
I have also learned that hurt people, hurt people. I have learned that while some use their most painful experiences to motivate healing for humanity, others use it to justify harm to other humans. The self-righteous belief that one was wronged by the world during a painful experience can motivate revenge upon others. This may be naïve, as it may require that one believes that anyone can endure life without enduring such painful experiences. For this reason, I have found the following saying to ring true: if you do not heal from that which hurt you, you will bleed on those who never cut you.2
The cruelty of nature requires that the rest of us bear witness to wicked behavior. Perhaps this is the mercy of nature as well, for the victims of such behavior.
Among the most wicked of behaviors, I see domestic violence. I do not see domestic abuse as the presence of violence, but rather the absence of the depths of love that extend tenderness and automate self-control in the most trying of situations between two people.
As though it were an albino crocodile, one knows domestic abuse to exist but never expects to encounter it. I cannot imagine what domestic abuse is like to endure, but I can tell you it is more excruciating to witness than a kidney stone is to pass.
At first, I was young, and I simply thought that common sense was enough for him to break up with his girlfriend. I thought to myself, when a relationship requires you to endure a constant stream of criticism and outright bullying, you tend to leave those relationships. Nevertheless, I watched him stick around. I remembered a haunting experience when in my presence she had admitted proudly that if he ever left her, that she would kill herself. So, he stayed.
Accusations, threats, hitting, low-blows, and manipulated isolation.
Constantly requiring him to prove something to her.
Constantly dangling him in the balance of volatile behavior.
Constantly telling him how everything was his fault; everything to do with the reality that he had been trapped inside.
Feeling the weight of his pain on my heart I mustered an ‘out’ for him that would result in everyone’s safety. Unfortunately, he had been in a car accident while she had secretly decided to stop her birth control. He would never abandon his beautiful child, so he stayed.
More accusations, threats, hitting, low-blows, and manipulated isolation.
Still constantly requiring him to prove something to her.
Still constantly dangling him in the balance of volatile behavior.
Still, he was bearing blame for every inconvenience.
Still, he was working overtime to create happy family moments.
Still, I had a front-row seat.
I could not leave her for him. I offered him the only out I saw. I cried and shook before his wedding.
My patience feels evil. It feels evil to be patient with him, knowing that he will endure more abuse the longer he stays. I cannot leave her for him.
I can provide a safe place should he need one. I can report what I see in accordance with the law, and I can pray. My patience is prayer. Prayer is all that keeps my patience intact. Constantly pleading for safe resolution, I keep praying. My heart breaks that I cannot do more.
You see, kidney stone episodes are beyond my control. I cannot end them through any action of my own. I struggle to justify inaction when pain can be prevented or ended.
Still, I practice patience. I pray that God teaches me the limits of healthy patience, and I pray that he delivers all victims of domestic abuse from their pain. Amen.
You First
In college, I learned a lot about relationships, specifically friendships.
I learned how to recognize when someone really didn’t care for my friendship.
I learned how to tell when someone wasn‘t taking care of themself enough to fully participate in a friendship.
I learned how to tell when a person was in denial, and only really wanted empty validation.
I learned that I can’t willingly give empty validation.
I learned to love my friends truthfully.
I learned to set appearances and customs aside and to give people the benefit of the doubt for no reason at all.
I learned to step back when a friend was fighting a personal battle, and I learned to applaud their efforts.
I learned to do right by my friends and to squash any thoughts that told me to measure reciprocation.
I learned to celebrate my friends, for the little and big moments.
I learned to give of myself, whatever I had to offer in the moment, not blaming myself for what I could not give.
I’m learning to accept from others, never measuring a gift, always thankful for the friendship that gives it.
I learned that great friendship encourages a person to put their own well-being before all else.
Bravely, We Go3
When I was a child, I had to be brave a lot.
I had to be brave enough to cycle through
inconclusive traumatic diagnostic tests as an infant and toddler. I had to be brave enough to roll out of bed with constricted airways and use my strength to find a way to wake my parents in the middle of the night, as a toddler. I had to be brave enough to
eat new foods before I could read the words peanut or citrus. I had to be brave enough to be cared for by persons other than my Mother, who tracked and meticulously managed every aspect of my delicate health. I had to be brave enough to conquer pneumonia
over, and over, and over again. I had to be brave enough to overcome unrelenting recurrences of kidney stones from the age of 8 years old. Brave enough to cover my pain during school and dance recitals. Brave enough to seek assistance fully knowing I was usually met with
skepticism and disbelief that a child of my age could have my condition. Brave enough to wear strange corrective glasses during adolescence for my Irlen Syndrome. Brave enough to wear a medical mask to school when I was at-risk and allergic to the H1N1 vaccine.
Brave enough to face the subsequent criticism from my peers. Brave enough to run a mile for gym class while feeling my lungs struggle and strain. Brave enough to complete my sit-ups test directly after, despite my change in coloration and inability to feel
my legs. Brave enough to continue to attend school when my citrus allergy started causing airway constriction after only airborne exposure. Brave enough to live in NYC for a summer at 16 with only my fellow Ballerinas. Brave enough to go on stage after missing
rehearsals due to a kidney stones episode I faced by myself. Brave enough to be treated in the ER without being able to communicate through the pain, with no parent present. Brave enough to take responsibility for my recovery from severe head trauma, memory
loss, change in cognitive ability, the onset of mental illness, and whiplash. Brave enough to forgive the driver.
These were formative years; my harder moments retold from birth until high school graduation.
Now I have the bravery to ask of you, knowing full and well the burden.
I hear your doubts, your fears, your anger,
and your regrets. I see the fingers pointed and the voices raised, but we are one people. We are made up of relatives however closely or distantly related. Many of our different opinions stem from the same goodwill.
Put your doubt away, stow your fear in the overhead bin.
Trust yourself. For each time I had to
exhibit bravery, I had to root it in trust. This started as a trust for others and has developed into trust in myself. I trust that I will continue to do what I can to keep myself safe. I trust that I will find a creative path when all seems hopeless. I trust
that I will continue to seek to understand and do good in the world. Tell me I can trust this from you too.
Tell me I can trust that you and I will
move forward to create a more ideal world. Tell me I can trust that you will innovate and work hard alongside me for the benefit of others.
If everyone understands and looks out
for someone else who is different from them, no one gets left in the shadows or is systemically forgotten.
Everywhere
We’ve all heard the wise words of Martin Luther King Jr.; “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” But… What does that mean?
You may be thinking, okay so if a tree falls in a forest that’s a threat to trees everywhere? No, it isn’t. But if the culture starts to celebrate the deforester more than it mourns the tree, who is at risk? Well, not the deforester.
Our culture today is explosive. When something happens that people will be interested in, we tend to find out immediately because the production and spread of high-interest information have become very profitable. News travels at the speed of light.
Let’s put this in the context of school shootings. School shootings are something that we can all generally agree are horrible, we just don’t agree on a path to resolution. When a school shooting happens, we all want to know. We want to know who was hurt and why it happened. We feel the need to explain the situation so we can assess whether we ourselves or our own families are at risk. Generally, we conclude that we aren’t. We distance ourselves from the victims using rationalizations like, well it’s a real shame for the people of Connecticut to be facing this issue, but [our state] is fortunate enough to not have that problem.
Have you ever stopped to think about the conclusions we bring ourselves to? Do we simultaneously ask ourselves whether our schools are actually taking more effective preventative measures than the school in question, or are we content to simply manifest that belief into our own realities? We resume regular activities by convincing ourselves that we are far from harm, with little or no reason to do so.
If we really cared about the realities facing our communities, we would do our research. We would tabulate common paths of access to firearms for school-aged children. We would seek information about how those paths apply to our individual communities. We would examine whether sociopathic tendencies or the prevalence of bullying in schools affects the probability of a school shooting. We would examine our community’s intervention programs for young people trending toward bullying or sociopathic behaviors. We would simultaneously examine the effectiveness of those programs.
Why are we content to convince ourselves of half-truths, when we could actually be improving upon the safety of our communities? Are we really that lazy?
Let’s revisit the tree in the forest. Did we ever see it get cut down, or did we assume that’s how it fell? Do we know for a fact that disease isn’t spreading through the trees, or that a new storm pattern isn’t threatening trees over a certain height? We don’t. We preferred to believe this was an isolated incident.
Every time a school shooting occurs and we resolve to do nothing we promote a culture where school shootings can continue to occur. No community expects a school shooting. If we do not learn from history or even the present, these tragedies repeat themselves.
In our refusal to believe that injustice somewhere else has issued a threat to our own children, we have put our children at risk. The naive belief that school shootings are isolated and have not created an information-rich precedent for some troubled youth behaviors is convenient and irresponsible.
Morgan Dickason grew up in the Union Bridge Church of the Brethren and is now working as a Portfolio Analyst in Indianapolis, IN. She spent a partial lifetime of examining theological perspectives presented in MAD youth, Western Plains youth, by family members such as Reverend Barbara Leininger Dickason and the late Reverend Verne Henry Leininger, and much more. In the spirit of ‘love thy neighbor’, she has developed a central unwavering faith in humanity that prevails independently from fluctuations in human behavior.
- Trust refers to the relinquishment of implied control or power to another.
- Source unknown.
- This piece was inspired by the words of Amanda Gorman in “The Hill We Climb.”