Chronic Sorrow

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So I read a post today that centred around this thought of chronic sorrow.  The website navigated to a home page describing something that I can identify so much with as I read it.

What is Chronic Sorrow?

Chronic sorrow is the presence of recurring intense feelings of grief in the lives of parents or caregivers with children who have chronic health conditions. At its core, chronic sorrow is a normal grief response that is associated with an ongoing living loss. It is the emotion-filled chasm between “what is” versus the parents’ view of “what should have been.”
Sometimes called a “living loss” 1 because it doesn’t go away, chronic sorrow may stay in the background while the family does their best to incorporate the child’s care into their usual routine. If a medical crisis or event occurs which magnifies the loss and disparity between reality and the life once dreamed of, it can trigger a return of the profound sadness.
Parents or caregivers of premature babies, children with diabetes, sickle cell disease, spina bifida, epilepsy, muscular sclerosis, and developmental disabilities may have to cope with chronic sorrow. Caregivers of family members with Alzheimer’s disease or other ongoing illnesses, as well as couples experiencing infertility, may also have chronic sorrow.

Chronic Sorrow: A Living Loss, Susan Roos, 2002 ↩

I fully get this. The to and fro between periods of okayness with an illness and the chaos of a flare up.

I just didn’t realise that it had a name.

My brain thinks about all of this.  This idea of living in the ‘what is’ to ‘what could have been’ or even what still could be (because hope is alway alive in my heart) – isn’t that just life?

Life is often doing a merry twirl on the dance floor known as limbo land.

In Christian speak, we often talk about the now and the not yet.  The gap between what heaven says, what God thinks and what plays out in our lives.  Sometimes the gap is huge and I am so aware of it.

Life is filled with chronic sorrow.  But even as my eyes scan this website, I am super thankful that my faith ins’t in a world labelling system, but my eyes are on a kingdom and a king whose name is above every name – including cystic fibrosis and chronic sorrow.

I’m reminded of my fav Dave Crowder lyrics “Earth has no sorrow that heaven can’t heal”

I choose that space – to hope, to believe, to know Him in the middle of it all.

ADVENT

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If your house is anything like ours – the excitement for Christmas is brewing, especially from the 4 year old who had no concepts of dates or time, and has no clue what time frame we are working on when we tell her “not yet – soon”. The numbers on her advent calendar are wasted

I spoke this time last year at our MOPS morning in church all about advent. We attempted some cute advent crafts with the goal of keeping some sort of faith based activity in our families in the middle of the Christmas chaos.

As I was prepping for that morning, I was reminded about the whole idea of advent. The building up towards something.

The word itself is Latin and means – waiting.

Who loves waiting? Not me.

With Christmas – the wait builds a bigger anticipation. The excitement grows as the day get closer. The wait is a good one.

So what’s different?

The number 25.

We have a final peak, we know when and what it involves. The certainty of it is not up for debate. We know. The wait is exciting when we have the end in sight.

But what happens in the other type of waiting? You know the one I mean. The wait that has been longer than we thought. The wait that seems to have no best before or expiry date. The wait that has lost that excitement of the final moment. The wait that still doesn’t see.

Advent is a season of waiting. Original advent didn’t have the number 25 either on its calendar. The wait time was unknown. In fact everything about it was an anomaly. Israel waited on rescue and God sent a baby. What?

I’m drawn to the incredible way God works things out. Again there is a simple profound truth that God will always see and do things differently. And simpler again is the underlying crutch of our faith – do we trust Him?

To quote the husbands recently penned lyrics

In the waiting I will trust in you…

As my mind regurgitates information about waiting and as my heart feels all the emotions of a long wait…. the Christmas story points me to some home truths.

God is with us.

God is working in our waiting.

As surely as the sun rises each morning – He is faithful.

In CS Lewis’s The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – Narnia is stuck in winter. Spring hasn’t sprung for a very long time. The people of Narnia have adjusted to winter and the majority have settled. But there are whispers of hope heard in certain circles that Aslan is coming and he’s bringing spring with him.

I want to raise the whisper to a shout.

I want to be excited in the waiting, believing that the way everything plays out is detailed and perfect. After all – He is good, He’s for us and He gives good gifts.

Be encouraged… He knows where and when number 25 is.

Wrong will be right, when Aslan comes in sight,

At the sound of his roar, sorrows will be no more,

When he bares his teeth, winter meets its death,

And when he shakes his mane, we shall have spring again.

CS Lewis


Christmas is just around the corner.