Sometimes what seems like a blessing can actually be a curse, and the other way around. Kate had learned that the hard way when…
… she fell. She was 14 and was riding her bike at the home of her friend, Dawn. Dawn lived with her mother in an apartment complex with buildings around a “quad” of grass. Kate and Dawn had been riding their bicycles down the alley behind Dawn’s apartment. It was such fun to be with a girlfriend who cared enough to put a carrot into Kate’s open mouth right before she woke up… snoring. Dawn was the friend that Kate had not had before.
Kate yelled ahead to Dawn as they rode down the alley.
“Dawn, I need to stop and rest.”
Dawn stopped on her bike, put her left foot on the ground, with her right foot still on the pedal, and she looked over her left shoulder back at Kate as Kate slowed her bike to prepare to stop. As Kate stopped and stepped off her bike, the strength in her left leg gave out and she fell, with the bike falling on top of her.
“I’m okay,” she said to Dawn, reassuringly, as Dawn looked back at her and giggled at Kate’s clumsiness. Kate tried to get up and she could not. She intuitively knew she was far from alright. Something was terribly wrong. The weakness was not only in her left leg; it was in all parts of her body from her legs to her neck. She tried again to get up but had no strength to lift her body that now felt like she had suddenly stepped from earth to Jupiter. The ground seemed to pull her down and she had no strength to resist. Her life suddenly felt surreal.
“Just go ahead. I’ll catch up with you,” she called ahead to Dawn. Dawn then raced off in anticipation of Kate joining her again on her bike. Failing to raise herself, and deeply frightened by the unresponsiveness of her body, she crawled out from under the bike and left it where she fell. Kate crawled the 10 car lengths down the alley to Dawn’s apartment and, with bloodied knees and scraped legs she knocked on the bottom of the back door, all the while praying that
Dawn’s mother would be there. Kate could not stand up to knock on the upper part of the door. Would Dawn’s mother hear her feeble knock at the bottom of the door?
As Kate’s illness progressed, she asked deep questions about her own value and why her body was betraying her. Where was the God that she had learned about in her Anglican church? She prayed all the time to not fall, and still she fell… everywhere – in school, down flights of stairs, off curbs. She also asked God, as she understood Him at that age, what she was supposed to do now that her body did not work as it should. She suffered not only the inability to continue her adolescent life normally, like all the other kids at school, but she suffered under the judgmental scrutiny of the kids who just stared at her and walked past her when she fell in the hallway and could not get up.
Years later, when Kate’s own child had serious medical problems, Kate realized that her own illness had planted seeds of compassion, perseverance, strength, love, patience, and endurance for the long-haul. Kate was actually grateful that she had suffered those many years with her own illness. She could now share her compassion, acceptance, love, patience, and endurance with others who were suffering.
Kate had learned to listen differently. Her values had changed. She realized now that our life on earth is upside down. “We live in an upside-down world,” she would later tell select friends. We think good is always good, while the truth is that good is sometimes bad because we do not learn when we live with only sunshine. We must also have rain and cold and even frost sometimes. All sunshine will create a desert, while the seasons of life bring life to fruition. Our seasons in life bring our fruit to maturity, enabling us to feed others.
Such were the lessons that came from Kate’s illness. What she thought was a curse had turned into a forever-blessing.
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