The other day, as I looked down on her, helplessly trapped by the cold chrome bars of a hospital bed — like a beautiful parakeet confined to a cage — a strange alien wave of love engulfed me.
My wife of 31 years, formerly a highly accomplished medical professional, full of endless compassion, uncommon intelligence and disarming humor, now lies helplessly, unable to feed herself or attend to her most basic needs.
She depends upon me and a few visiting caregivers for everything, subjecting this formerly private, dignified, statuesque beauty to the constant ministrations of strangers who, as caringly as possible, regularly poke, prod, clean and dress her wasting body.
For 10 years she has been cruelly assailed by various mysterious systemic neurological dysfunctions that have mercilessly and progressively robbed her of walking, dancing, tennis and even talking.
As she has involuntarily transitioned from independence to total dependence she has done so with the kind of grace, strength, courage and unswerving faith in her God that puts me to shame in comparison. I am in awe of this mighty lady.
But God never promised us a rose garden.
Most people would view such a “bad break” as her disease like a home invasion, destroying our lives and taking away our “golden years” future. And absent divine intervention, I suppose they would be right.
I can only speak for myself here, but as her full-time primary caregiver, I am witnessing an inner miracle that proves the working of God in my own life. This season in our lives reminds me of the stirring passage written by the Apostle Peter in 1 Peter 4:11-13:
“Beloved, do not be surprised at the fiery ordeal among you, which comes upon you for your testing, as though something strange were happening to you …”
Somehow, often quite imperceptibly, God employs the crucible of our ordinary circumstances to work His ingenious spiritual formation plan, often employing pain and suffering as “tools” in His workshop.
Left to myself, I would have long since bolted from this seemingly impossible challenge, spewing self-serving excuses as I dumped my wife off into the waiting “arms” of some elder-care institution supposedly better equipped to “take care” of her.
I would have viewed my now-infirm wife as a liability, a problem, a project who was dragging me down and holding me back. And I could do this justifying myself every step of the way, even soliciting the sympathy of others for “my plight.”
Such is the sad state of this man’s heart apart from the active, transforming work of the Holy Spirit.
Yet here I am, reporting to you as a living miracle — a flawed, imperfect bumbler, yes. But thank God, one who turns up every morning faithfully for a difficult duty that I would have shrunk away from years ago.
Had you told me on our wedding day that this is what lay ahead, the old me would have said, “Fuhgeddaboudit!”
Sure, I suppose I loved my wife before she became ill but, truth be known, I mostly took her for granted. I had no idea what I had in her, and seldom interrupted my breakneck pace of life to really look at her. As I wrote in a 2019 column, “Marriage Flourishes When There Are Three of You”:
“On a purely natural level, we should have been divorced on our honeymoon. On that occasion, we were ‘touring’ Scotland in my normal take-no-prisoners manner, blasting from town to town, rushing through castles, climbing double time up staircases, pounding down frenzied meals, and focused zombie-like on our next destination.
“Then, midway through one leg of my private marathon, she let out a primal scream, ‘STOP!!’ I slammed on the brakes, and as the blue tire smoke cleared, her terrifying visage in the seat next to me was scarier than anything the Scottish Highlands could muster, dead or alive.
“She reminded me that this was our honeymoon, not an Olympic touring event.”
How About You?
Say what you will about the existence of God, but if He can turn a hard-hearted narcissistic roughneck from the wrong side of the tracks like me into anything approaching a caring human, then all those miracles in the Bible would be a piece-of-cake in comparison.
God is still in the business of retrieving the lost, redeeming the broken and binding up the wounded. Don’t ever think your case is too far gone. Hey, what’s to lose?
As 2 Corinthians 3:17-18 reminds us, “… where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. But we all, with unveiled faces, looking as in a mirror at the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from glory to glory, just as from the Lord, the Spirit.”
— D.C. Collier is a Bible teacher, discipleship mentor and writer focused on Christian apologetics. A mechanical engineer and Internet entrepreneur, he is the author of My Origin, My Destiny, a book focused on Christianity’s basic “value proposition.” Click here for more information, or contact him at don@peervalue.com. Click here for previous columns. The opinions expressed are his own.