No matter how many times it happens, it always seems to come as a shock to me.  To all of me.  To my mind.  To my system.  To my head. To my joints.  To my psyche.  I don’t know why I thought this time might be any different.  Call me an optimistic pessimist but I truly hoped the small changes I’ve made might at least have the decency to respond with small improvements.  Yet here I am, once again in painful disbelief.

It’s not that I don’ like the change in weather.  I do.  I love fall. LOVE. FALL.  It is my favorite time of year.  The weather is divine.  It is finally cool enough to wear my favorite uniform—well-worn jeans and a honkin big ol’ hoodie.  I am cozy from head to toe and ready to take a hike.  Literally.  The sun shines nearly every day.  The colors are spectacular and all of nature shows off like a preschooler in their new Halloween costume.  The smells of leaves and wood and fire soothe me and I breathe them in deeply, like you do when you return home and someone is baking fresh bread or your favorite cookies.  It isn’t just a scent—it’s a feeling.  I am seldom happier than I am in this very season.

Which is why it totally SUCKS that my body HATES FALL.

“Boy, the temperature is really dropping,” my husband tells me, after being outside for the second time.

“Oh, I am very well aware, thank you.”  My internal barometer has already made it QUITE CLEAR.  I don’t need to be outside to know—the mercury is falling.

I’ve always been able to predict the weather, but as I’ve gotten older, my innate meteorological abilities have definitely increased along with my accumulating years.  I wish I could say I’ve gotten used to it.  But each time the barometric pressure changes and ushers in cooler air—even if that cooler air is welcomed—my body launches a several day protest.  Which today is both ironic and infuriating.

Because after a week of unseasonable warmth, which forced me to repaint my toenails one last time and forsake my cozy sweatshirts, the weather has finally decided to concede to the season at hand.  Which I welcome joyously and wholeheartedly, with this one, tiny exception…

I hurt ALL. OVER.

It is as if I am radiating pain—more of a sense of being than a pinpointable ailment.  Of course, I CAN identify certain, distinct points of indignation—my head, my constant and reliable weather detection device throughout my entire life, has the predictable stabbing pain running through my forehead and the familiar vice grip is tightening around the muscles of my neck, causing everything from my neck up to rage at me silently.  My hip graciously reminds me it is not so happy with me, either.  And by not so happy, I mean downright ANGRY.

But the rest is really undefinable—it is free-form and ambient.  It is as if I am floating in it—a pool of pain from which I cannot get out.  Resonating. Pulsating.  Demotivating.  I am surrounded by it.  I do not like to be surrounded.

Despite years of experience with this malady, I have still not made many gains in the realm of acceptance.  I have yet to come to a consistent place of peaceful coexistence with pain—perhaps because its roar in my ear makes peace an impossibility.  Resistance and aggravation are much more my style, unfortunately.  I want with all that is in me to launch a counter attack and force this beast into submission.  But, year after year, my resistance has been, as they say, futile.

Truth be told, which is, after all, what I promised to do, I just really want to MAKE IT GO AWAY.  It is as if, to put on my counselor hat for a moment, I am indefinitely in a stage of bargaining.  Not wanting to acknowledge the loss but fighting furiously to somehow, magically, impossibly make the outcome different.  Joan Didion, when she wrote about the sudden death of her husband, called it “magical thinking.”

Delusional works, too.

This is, perhaps, after all, why what is known as the “Serenity Prayer” was written.  God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.

I love this prayer.  If you’ve never read it in its entirety, look it up.  It’s that good.  But it is also HARD.  Like, really, really, really-really hard.

You see, I know there are things I can change, but in my all-or-nothing-ness I tend to at times lack the wisdom to know which changes can and should be made.  Likewise, I lack the discernment to identify what is within the realm of possible change and what I just need to learn to accept, plain and simple.  And, to be quite frank, there is a sense, as well, that merely praying the prayer itself is a concession—I cannot change it ALL.  Despite the fact that I really, REALLY want to.

Loving the prayer is often easier than living it.

Our pastor talked tonight—as I was half-way through writing this—about finding God in difficulty.  About reaching out to God from our hardest places and seasons.  About finding him there when we do.  Sitting there struggling to focus through the pain, I found myself disagreeing somewhat.  Given my vast wrestling experience, I don’t think we reach out to God from those spaces and grasp hold of him and draw him close to us.  I think it is less a reaching out to God and more of a surrendering to his sovereignty that then allows God, who has been there all along, to reach out and draw US, no longer kicking and screaming, to HIM.

I have run my white flag up and down my pole more times than I can count.  I have kicked and I have screamed and I have wrestled and I have walked away with a literal limp.  I want to stop.

Serenity.  Courage.  Wisdom.  I want more of these things.  I want to live in this place.  I want to, as the prayer goes on to say, accept hardship as the path to peace, taking the world as it is, not as I would have it.

But when the barometric pressure changes or the temperature drops and my body mounts its resistance, I am reminded of just how very far I have yet to go.

acceptance chronic pain faith pain seasons surrender