Brokenness to Beauty

Introduction

How do you handle traumatic news? How do you move through each day when it feels like your old familiar world is crumbling around you? Is it possible, and if so how, to live joyfully and confidently while assailed by pain, fear, or devastating loss?

As I contemplated and prayed about what I would say in a book about going through suffering—and getting through it whole and better than when one started the journey—it became clear to me that several principles are of vital importance, both for those who are going through trials and for those who walk alongside them. These principles became the framework upon which I sculpted the body of this book.

My journey in dealing with life’s difficulties began not with breast cancer at age fifty-seven but with myasthenia gravis (MG), a debilitating and often life-threatening disease, diagnosed when I was fifteen years old. Part 1, therefore, travels back in time to my youth, where my life lessons in struggle and suffering started. Like a stone skipping along the surface of a lake, this section touches on points in my life up to the day I heard the frightening news that I had breast cancer.

What informs and shapes our responses to trials? How does that make a difference in the way we move through them? As I analyzed how I cope with hard times and traumatic events, I realized how much the Bible has influenced the way I live. In Part 2, we will explore this first principle: the importance of the Bible to our lives.

Most people at some point—usually when they feel helpless and in great need of something or Someone beyond themselves—pray. What is prayer? Does prayer make a difference in our lives, both in crisis times and ordinary days, or is it just noise in the air? Whistling in the dark? How significant is prayer to one going through suffering of any sort? In Part 3 we consider these questions and realities about prayer.

Misery may love company, but sufferers definitely need it. We all need other people to help and support us in times of suffering and trial. In Part 4, we take a look at the importance of a community of support for those who are going through difficult times.

Finally, in Part 5, I challenge us to take a look beyond what our eyes can see to that which our hearts can perceive: an eternal perspective that gives us what we need to live above the pain and suffering of this life and do so with joy and peace. When you are down it can sometimes be hard to get up, even literally hard to drag yourself out of bed in the morning. But when we have a reason to get up, it helps propel us even on our darkest days. What purpose could be so compelling as to give us resolve in the throes of suffering? I’ll tackle this question in the final part of the book.

Many excellent books have been written about aspects of suffering and living life in the midst of it. On the Resources page, I have compiled a short list of valuable books and online helps for additional reading in hopes that these may further encourage you in your own journey. You can also read my original blog, detailing my cancer journey, at http://jacquesjourney.blogspot.com.

Most of our days are filled with activities that pull us in many directions at once; therefore, this book is structured so that it may be read in short sections, easily adapted to a busy lifestyle. It is my hope that I have written these few chapters simply and clearly enough so that those who read it may, as with the vision given to Habakkuk, “read it fluently,” or with understanding, so that they may go on in their life journey stronger for it and in turn share it with others (Habakkuk 2:2).

Part 1: My Story

Chapter 1: Then to Now

“I have the diagnosis. It is breast cancer.” The doctor’s words hit me like a stomach punch, taking my breath away. I had the urge to turn and look over my shoulder to see who he was talking to; certainly not me! My mind reeled, simultaneously rejecting and absorbing the news:

I have cancer.

I recalled another doctor, many years earlier, saying almost the same words when I was just fifteen: “I know the diagnosis.” The doctor told my parents I had a rare disease called myasthenia gravis. It sapped my strength and energy: in one year I deteriorated from an energetic teenager into a listless one. Constantly weak and tired, I had increasing difficulty talking, chewing, swallowing, and keeping my eyelids open. It was hard to grip things with my hands, lift my arms to comb my hair, or carry my schoolbooks. My arms felt like lead weights.

At night in bed I secretly cried, asking God what was wrong with me. Why wasn’t my body working right? It felt like a rusty suit of armor enclosed me, weighing me down so that I couldn’t move freely. I wasn’t imagining the drooping eyelids, my inability to talk and eat and use my hands, arms, and legs . . . was I? Was I going crazy?

Part 2: The Bible

  Chapter 2: Finding Hope

“The grass withers, the flower fades, but the word of our God stands forever.”

Isaiah 40:8

Opening my Bible, I turned to the next psalm in my daily reading, which began, “Praise the LORD! I will give thanks to the LORD with all my heart” (Psalm 111:1). And my heart said, “No, I don’t want to; I don’t feel like praising God. I’d rather demand to know why this is happening to me. Someone just dumped a heavy weight on me, a weight that could kill me, and I definitely do not like it. I sure don’t feel like giving thanks!”