What HOPE Looks Like
Being a big believer in nutrition (read: borderline obsessed), I started an all-natural protocol in late 2015 to see if I could kick my autoimmune diseases to the curb, and stopped exercising to see what diet alone could do. I know exercise helped tremendously, but I wondered…how much progress could I make with food alone as my medicine? In a matter of a few months I knew I was much better, and off all my remaining immune-modifying meds. Within 5 months of starting this protocol I was able to leave my doctor’s office with his official decree: I was in remission, and it was diet alone that did it. It was the very first time in 15 years I didn’t leave his office with lab orders. The first and only time in 60 visits.
When I took up exercise again running was on the calendar. As I took my favorite route I have dubbed in my Polar software as “The Hill of DOOM” (seriously, that’s what I call it, because halfway up you think you’re going to die), I was reminded of how far God has brought me.
Fifteen years ago I sat in my doctor’s office trying in vain to hold back tears as he gave me my diagnosis. He told me that it was his goal to give me a “normal life” in spite of rheumatoid arthritis, but he would try to keep me out of a wheelchair for as long as he could. It was bad. Really bad. In fact, he said, “You have RA, and it’s really, really sh*tty.” Super
I remember driving home on the 5 South that day from Encinitas and crying quietly, not knowing what to do with the potential prognosis of a wheelchair. The most difficult challenge of that entire time wasn’t the actual diagnosis, or the excruciating, debilitating pain, or how severely and quickly it had impacted my life and shrunk it to a tiny pinprick; it was the assault on my identity that utterly rocked my world. Two months before that initial appointment I had been a healthy, 31 year old, active woman with a job, a business and a life. I was capable. Then one day I couldn’t even tolerate the weight of a bed sheet on my feet, much less walk normally. It felt like someone was beating the bottom of my feet with a 2×4 every 10 seconds. Twenty-four hours a day, every day. I had been perfectly healthy (or so I’d thought), and then…I wasn’t. I felt like my life was over.
By the time I passed the Balboa exit, I remember hitting the steering wheel with my fist and vociferously saying to myself, “Oh hell no. I am NOT rolling over to this.” Little did I know that in many ways, my life was just beginning.
I have one of those freaky weird memories where I remember just about everything. This is one of those seasons of life where I wish I could do a full-on mind-scrub, but in the months that followed there were just a series of defining moments. Because of that, there will be no wishing away the look on his face, or the emotions which swamped me as I listened to his words and tried to process it all in the weeks and months that followed. It’s super annoying sometimes as I try in vain to forget painful or embarrassing memories from decades past, but as I was running up the Hill of DOOM today, dragging my poor, out of shape dog behind me, I realized that in some ways, that memory is a blessing. If I didn’t have such a clear recollection of that time, I wouldn’t be able to see and know the changes God has ordained.
Ultimately God is hope and is the Author of hope, but practically, in our day to day lives, hope and the realizations of hope take on many forms. It can look like getting through a particularly difficult financial pinch, or reconciling with a family member after years of rejection. It can be that person you’ve yet to meet whom you want to marry and spend the rest of your life, or a baby in your arms. It can be the salvation of a loved one. Hope can be seeing your child smile again after fighting a horrible disease, or a veteran as they overcome battle wounds, both seen and unseen. Or the day you and your spouse retire and set off to travel the world together. Hope looks differently to all of us – big, small, miraculous or the mundane – it’s still something that’s important to YOU and keeps you going. It’s that little glimmer God has placed in your heart in which you’re afraid to believe sometimes.
As I got to the top of The Hill of DOOM, just before my dog passed out from exhaustion, her tongue falling out of her face, laying there in the dirt, the wheelchair memory hit me. I looked down at the hill I’d just climbed – the dirt path and rocks over which we’d leapt, the beautiful, puffy white clouds in the sky and the blue, blue ocean in the distance that always calls to me – and I was overwhelmed with the memory of what could have been. This view, THIS is what hope looks like to me, at least one version.
Fifteen years ago I was given a figurative death sentence which I promptly rejected. It often wasn’t easy to keep going as serious flares would hit me from time to time, or when the traveling pain that never really left would derail me for months. But I never gave up. I never gave up hoping that I’d be healed and that once again I’d be ABLE. I mean, in my mind I was hoping that I would be, you know… “Huh-HEALED!” by the Holy Spirit. But it turns out I was to be an active participant in my healing.
As I look back now, I’m so incredibly grateful that God used that method. I cannot put a price on the knowledge or wisdom I’ve gained by partnering with God in my own healing. And I cannot begin to tell you how humbling it’s been to know, to actually LIVE the process, to experience that God’s way is best. That everything we need for health and healing has already been provided by Him. God designed us with an immune system meant to heal our maladies and fight disease.
Fifteen years of autoimmune diseases, pharmaceuticals and doctor visits, a nasty divorce that devastated me for years and left me with severe adrenal fatigue and a whole buttload of emotional baggage to sift through and overcome, along with autoimmune flares from hell….and yet, I never stopped hoping. Granted sometimes my “hope” looked like it was dragged behind an off-road racecar, over a bunch of boulders and tumbleweeds before being run over by an errant truck, but it still hung on like a mangled bumper attached by a rusty wire.
Fifteen years ago I was bound to a future which included a wheelchair, but God never allowed me to lose hope, and I once again ran The 4.5 mile Hill of DOOM circuit like I’ve done many, many times, and will do again. God willing, that wheelchair will never be my future for any reason, but the fact that He gave me the tools to know how to overcome that particular sentence is a gift I cannot take for granted. The fact that I’m in better shape now than I was then is far beyond a gift, and much more than I deserve. And I’m once again reminded that God’s plans for our future are far better than anything we can imagine.
So what does YOUR hope look like? What deep God-given desire has He placed in your heart? A.W. Tozer once said hope is the divine alchemy that transmutes the base metal of adversity into gold.
Don’t forget it. And never give up.
May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that by the power of the Holy Spirit you may abound in hope. – Romans 15.13