If yesterday was excruciating, today has been merely painful with a few smatterings of agony. At 4:30pm yesterday I had called one of our members and told him to be ready, that I might not be able to preach today. Most of the day yesterday was spent in various positions of desperation upon the bed or on the couch. At one point my wife was outside and I needed to pee, and as I was making the 15 foot shuffle between bed and bathroom, the spasms of pain brought me to my knees and eventually flat upon the floor. Eventually, with some help, I was finally able to make it to the bathroom. Last night I slept not too terribly bad, most of the night on my back (I'm usually a side sleeper), but got up at 3:30 to pee and needed help getting there.
Upon getting up at 7, I stretched my legs and back in bed as well as I could do for 20 minutes, before finally getting up. The first 20 minutes up were not fun at all, but after a hot shower I felt pretty good and decided that today I would preach. I managed to make it through the service with only a few spasms of pain, though by the time I got home this afternoon I thought it was time to sit in a hard chair for awhile.
Tomorrow I am driving a track trip for my daughter's school team...I am guessing that by tomorrow we will be somewhere between the painful and the annoying level, which means that I can probably go. It is not the best thing for my back, but somehow I'll muddle through this.
It hit me this as I was preaching today that my sermon was about what I had been experiencing. In Luke 8:22-25 the disciples are going through a terrible storm, thinking they will die, and Jesus calms things with a rebuke and he turns and says to them, 'Where is your faith?' Indeed, where was my faith in all these things? Yes, I know that times it's painful and even agonizing, but do I keep my trust in all these things? Today we saw another horrific event, the bombing of churches and hundreds killed in Sri Lanka, on the other side of the planet...do we continue to keep faith?
I am grateful that my back issues are not chronic. I especially feel for those who suffer with these things on a daily basis; going through these things makes me much more sympathetic towards those think they need medicinal marijuana and those who fall victime to opiods. I choose not to take anything much stronger than aleve, but would I if this was something that lasted more than a few days? Would I become that desperate?
Thankfully, the Lord is providing for me in these painful moments. But do I have faith to endure?
