Belief in Relief

when Jesus doesn't take the wheel

Welcome to the Back of the Flock, where we are slowed down by preschoolers who suddenly can’t handle wearing pants, teenagers who suddenly need new cleats, and the fifty-seven piles of rocks that the toddler is stockpiling around the house.

I got to attend the Festival of Faith & Writing last week, and I’m still riding the high of getting an unsolicited nod of approval from a TSA agent. Beyond that, I got to meet so many internet writer heroes and friends in real life (guess what? they have legs!). I have dozens of swirling thoughts from the workshops that I attended and a lot of work on my book to do in the next few weeks, but today’s essay has been bubbling over in the back of my brain.

Let’s get to it.

My son takes deep breaths and winces; he clutches his stomach and writhes, turning and twisting to try to relieve the discomfort in his abdomen that has plagued him for the past seven months. 

He looks at me, face wincing, “Help me, Mom” 
And I turn towards him, “Honey, I don’t know what to do.” 

Since the fall of last year, we’ve tried it all….home remedies and prescriptions, dietary changes and endoscopies, allergy tests, stool samples, naturopaths, G.I. specialists, and physical therapy. I’ve tracked patterns and made spreadsheets and spent countless hours dealing with physician’s offices and our insurance. What he has is not life-threatening, but it is…persistent…to the point that, despite his preteen hunger, he often doesn’t want to eat as that aggravates his symptoms. 

I don’t know what more to do. 

I offer sympathy instead. I tell him of my own faulty body and the years it took for it to right itself after I got so sick when they were all little. I remind him of all that we’re actively doing to try to alleviate his symptoms and how bodies demand our time and patience. I help him find distractions. I tell him how frustrated I’d be if I were him. 

But ultimately, he’s asking for help that I cannot give. 

Nine hours into my labor with him, the midwife had turned to me with wide eyes and told me to do the impossible — not push with the next contraction. My son’s heart was struggling to keep up after so many hours of pushing, so I had my very first lift-the-car-off-the-baby moment as I actively worked against every cell and instinct in my body that was screaming PUSH! We did this for five more contraction cycles, and finally, with the midwife’s guidance, I held him in my arms and felt his strong heartbeat close against mine. 

In that moment of my labor, I had known what to do to help him. And I would have done anything. I had rested in the relief of the of certainty and expertise of my midwife. And into the early years of his life, I felt like I somehow always had the answer to all his problems: a Batman bandaid for each scraped knee, his favorite stuffed monkey packed in a diaper bag pocket for the moments when the feelings got too big, the perfect snack to offer as a diversion. I knew just what he needed.

I wish I still felt that way.
Because I would still do anything to help him. 

Last week, I read a tale of a cat owner whose kitties had a specific meow that indicated they needed their human’s help. They meowed this way over empty food bowls and closed doors barring them from forbidden rooms, looking to their owner for help after identifying a problem. 

Recently, the owner realized that the cats were behaving the in this same way as they sat, forlorn, looking out the window on a rainy day. They meowed, looking back and forth from the problem of the downpour outside back to him, asking for help - Please, fix this. Get rid of the wet. The owner reported thinking silly cats as he went into the shower and turned on the rain.¹ 

To the cats, perhaps, the owner in this situation is just not applying himself properly. Or perhaps they think him a withholding despot, certain he could help them if only he wanted to. 

Sometimes I wonder if my son feels the same way about me. 
Sometimes I wonder the same thing about God. 

There is so much of life that longs for healing but remains broken — relationships scarred beyond repair, people who are starving amidst a war they didn’t ask for, tiny graves and empty wombs, division and discord around every corner, symptoms that stymie the best of physicians.
Just to name a few. 

I grew up singing, “God can do anything, anything, anything, anything, God can do anything but fail,” but sometimes when we identify the problem and turn towards God - Fix this! - the rain keeps falling anyway. 

Once, in middle school, during a youth group retreat weekend, my two best friends essentially broke up with me. They had their reasons, but I felt the floor falling out from under me as they told me they no longer wanted to be friends. I limped through the rest of the weekend, head down and under the unrelenting threat of public tears - teenage nightmare! It was my first taste of true rejection; and each time I thought about school and lunch tables the following week, my stomach hurt.

I held it all in, barely speaking the rest of the weekend for fear that one word would let the rest out, until I saw our family van in the church parking lot as the bus pulled in. As I climbed into the passenger seat, the floodgates opened. Thirty-six hours of pent-up emotion came pouring out of me as I struggled to breathe. My mom likely had all of the worst-case scenarios tearing through her mind as it took me several minutes to even be able to form words. When I finally explained what happened, she calmly turned off the ignition, leaned over the center console, and hugged me as a new reserve of tears flooded my eyes and the shoulder of her sweater.

Part of me wanted her to fix it, perhaps calling these girls’ mothers and railing on my behalf. But some other part of me knew that it wouldn’t actually make a difference. The universal inclusion rules of elementary school civilian life didn’t apply in the minefield of teenage politics. All she could do was hold me as I cried. She could sit with me in my sadness. She could cry with me.
And she did. 

Her presence didn’t provide solution, but it offered relief. 

Do you ever wonder if the gospels serve as more of a highlight reel of Jesus’ time on earth? Like maybe the disciples would exclaim, “Yes! Write that one down!” as though they were trying to put together an ad campaign? I mean, Jesus met a lot of people. And from what I can tell from my own 2024 vantage point, not everyone gets what they ask for. I wonder if there were times that Jesus simply sat and cried with the hurting, if he held a sick friend’s hand and handed over the kleenex instead of pronouncing, “Be healed!” 

Or maybe it’s the opposite. Maybe he healed every single person who asked and we just don’t get to read about all of them. After all, handwriting is slow and clumsy. We don’t really know, after all. 

But what I do know is this — Jesus is not Zeus. 

I’ve been reading a lot of Greek mythology this year, and can we all just agree that Zeus was the worst? He was petty and fickle and wildly unfaithful to his wife, horny as that one dog who always humps your leg. The times he deigned to come down from Mount Olympus and its platters overflowing with ambrosia were usually to take the form of a man or animal in his amorous pursuits. He wasn’t so much choosing to be in a body as he was choosing to be in a penis. 

In contrast, we have Jesus, who left a throne of cumulus clouds and a blue blanket of unfurled sky for the tight confines of a womb. Jesus, who we read was fully human — who cut teeth and got diaper rash, who banged his head on corners as he learned to walk, whose shins ached at night while his bones stretched out, who grew pimples and armpit hair, who woke up in the middle of the night with fevers and rubbed his runny nose raw. 

Can you imagine what this meant to the people of the Roman empire, steeped as they were in worship of the Greek gods? The writer of Hebrews gives us a picture of Jesus that is as empathetic as the vision of my therapist on the armchair across from me, draped in her standard-issue cardigan. We read that we do not have a Great High Priest locked away in the most holy places behind thick, unapproachable curtains but instead have a Great High Priest who is out here with the rest of us — who can sympathize and relate with our every weakness, who is intimate with the limitations of womb and tomb, who felt our mortality at its darkest, who sits with us in it all. (After all, that curtain was torn in two.)²

Do I believe in a God who can do anything?
I do.
Do I know a God who always does?
I don’t.

I’m not here to argue for or against a God -  either sovereign or impotent - or to die on any hills involving why God does not do it all.

Instead, I will rest on the center-console God, who leans toward me and lets me soak his shoulders with my tears. I will find comfort in the newborn-mother God, who promises to never leave me, even in the night, forsaking all sleep and slumber. I will rest in the vibrant, green grasses that shepherd God leads me to, even though it’s often found in the valleys. I will run my fingers along the hem of the Great High Priest, the one who knows our ache as intimately as he knows our bones, and I will feel relief in knowing that he will always, always turn back to me.

Fully God, Fully Human. 
The incarnation does not always provide a solution.
But in it, we find relief.

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Banner background photo by Peter Mizsak on Unsplash

1. My apologies. I took a screenshot of this anecdote about the cats but forgot to save the link. It’s out there somewhere!

2. Hebrews 4:14-16 ; Matthew 27:51