Dark Cloud

The Dark Cloud

I live these days under a dark cloud of deep depression. I have days when I seem to have some courage, some color. But I live under a dark cloud. I have trouble believing that God loves me, that God has my best interests at heart.

Neuromuscular Disease

In Nov 2019, I began to have double vision. My eyes stopped working correctly. Ophthalmologists could find nothing wrong with my eyes, until a neuro-ophthalmologist determined that I have a neuromuscular disease called myasthenia gravis. I began to also have severe trouble swallowing and general weakness. I felt I was constantly choking. My nervous system does not communicate properly with my muscles because my autoimmune system attacks the biochemical juncture between them. During the pandemic, I was taking copious doses of immune supressant drugs to control this disease. Now I am taking infusions every 8 weeks to control this disease, infusions of what is said to be the most expensive medicine on earth. It costs my insurance company almost $500k a year to keep me going.

During that year, my wife did not seem to take this disease seriously. She really did not step in to help. She pursued her busy life. While I was suffering and immune suppressed during the pandemic, barely able to function, against my strong protests she decided to fly to Texas to visit her friends. It did not seem to bother her that I felt she would return to put my life at great risk, nor that I would be left alone in such a fragile state. Not only was I terribly ill, it felt that my own wife wished me dead.

In the following year I had to have surgery to have my thymus gland removed, a common surgery for people who suffer from myasthenia gravis. Then it took a lot of doing, but I was authorized to receive this new medicine, which has thankfully put my symptoms mostly into remission. I do still have struggles but they are manageable. My life is dependent on this medicine.

Cancer

In August 2022 my wife began to have problems eating. It turned out that she had stomach cancer. She could keep nothing down, and became so weak she couldn’t stand or walk. The days leading up to Christmas that year, our fairly new car blew a head gasket and needed a new engine. We had to borrow a car. It was the worst ice storm I’ve ever seen in these parts, and we live at the bottom of a steep and long hill. I would never have considered driving out in such weather, but it was literally life or death for her to drive her down to Seattle to get a feeding tube. That very day, a newly installed crown on my tooth fell off. Yes it did. Don’t think I had time to go to the dentist to take care of this. It was not easy to get her down the stairs, out to the car, drive down to Seattle, get her in and out of a hotel, and to the hospital. She had her surgery Christmas eve, and on Christmas day I received the news that her cancer had spread. A few days later we received the news that her cancer was stage 4 and that it was highly unlikely that she would survive.

But she fought to live! The chemo alone almost killed her. My life went completely on hold being her caretaker. I have never seen such suffering. It was a constant flow of false hopes and horrible news. In and out of the emergency room and intensive care. I recall coming home from one of these stays and just yelling the F-word at God for well over an hour. Every single F-bomb was for something different and fresh, some newly remembered outrage. I could have gone on but I was finally exhausted. It was impossible. She was finally OK’d to go into hospice, but she was actually too sick to enter the hospice facility! Finally after a nine month battle, she was admitted and in less than 24 hours she was gone.

Gut Punch

I had a car wreck the day she died. Yes, I did. I was left with debt from the funeral and medical expenses, which many people helped with through a gofundme. God bless everyone who helped me that way! I could not have gotten through it all without such help. But it was still overwhelming. We had been dependent on her income.

A few weeks after she died, I learned that she had been having an affair. It was like being punched in the gut. It explained a lot, the constant late nights away, my devastating loneliness over the last years of our marriage. I had been at the point of leaving her when we found out she had cancer. Now she was gone, and then this. My life was shattered. My grief was deeply tainted. I cannot say I actually blame her. Our marriage was a friendship over the years, not a romance. I don’t blame her for reaching out for love. She was a wonderful and even magical person, who loved God and had a deep and abiding faith. I forgive her, I really do. But I am beset now with profound guilt and self-doubt and regret.

Where was God?

I would like to know, where was God through all of this? I could point to various blessings. We were loaned a car to take Betty to get her surgery. People were generous to help us. I am in the strange position of being grateful for being released from what seemed to me to be a very difficult marriage. I am grateful for these things, I truly am. Perhaps I should not be grateful for the release, I feel guilt over it. What kind of man is grateful for his wife’s death? The debt is considerable. My disease and my need for this medicine hangs like a guillotine over my head. I am even more lonely and disheartened. I feel stuck in this bitterness like a fly stuck in amber. One cannot snap one’s fingers and produce a new and loving wife. I’m not even sure I’m a man who could have such a wife. I am still lonely as I was in the marriage. How exactly am I to understand that God loves me through all of these things?

I am afflicted, storm-tossed and not comforted (Isaiah 54:11 NASB). It does not help me to say that such suffering is the likely fate of all of us. It does not help me to say that I ought not be overwhelmed, that our true hope is in the next life. Our afflictions are momentary and light only in comparison with the weight of glory they are somehow producing (2 Corinthians 4:17) – which means that in the face of great affliction, we have the hope of an overwhelmingly great and enduring glory. It does not diminish the truth of our affliction. It remains true that while I may hope and imagine for the revelation of that glory, right now I have first-hand experiential knowledge of the suffering. And I do not like it. At all.

All the grief books that were offered me assumed only that I lost a great and perfect fairy tale love. Nothing I’ve read speaks to this complexity of a broken and sinful man grieving for a genuinely sinful and deeply imperfect partner. These false atonements do not speak to my soul. I own my affliction and my lack of comfort and my guilt. My affliction is my dignity. It is the place of God’s meeting. It is in our sufferings that Christ and I find fellowship and oneness. I feel that He understands me, because He has suffered and died. It does not do to try to cast all of this as non-suffering or minor suffering or common suffering. Christ’s sufferings were not trivial because our sufferings are not trivial. My soul and my conscience will not be satisfied with such answers. I don’t mean that I refuse to be satisfied with such answers. I cannot be satisfied with such answers. There is no justice in them. My conscience will not bow to such trivial solutions.

What is the Answer?

What then is the answer? I go to the cross. I do not go to innocently and sweetly adore Jesus at its foot. I go to judge God. He is the One I am angry with. It is difficult to escape the notion that He caused this. It is difficult to escape the conclusion that He set this world to such suffering and awfulness. I go to the cross to beat him bloody and nail him and mock him and kill him. I do not approve of the way He has handled my life. You say, no! You cannot blame God!!! God is holy and blameless, are you crazy? Perhaps He is, but you are not wise enough to know it. It is a mystery. But the world, of which you are a part, has crucified God’s only begotten Son. It is humanity’s place, each individual, to judge God. Someone must be judged. The blame must go somewhere. Perhaps my wife’s cancer and infidelity is all my fault! No, it’s her fault! It is the church’s fault. It’s her family’s fault. It is society’s fault. It is the doctors’ fault. It was a bad education! She needed a better therapist. What good does any of this do? It’s everyone’s fault perhaps. The blame is all interwoven – it is our sin. But, God made all of this. He made me. He made her. He foresaw all of this. He knew and He made it all happen anyway. God foresaw the holocaust, think about that. It does no good to blame someone else. It is a fool’s game to tease it out. The place all of this quest for justice and answers for suffering should lead to is to the cross. It is God’s answer. Our sin is not merely our errant sexual proclivities, our greed, our lying. It is our hatred and judgment of God. This is what the cross declares – humanity’s hatred of God. This is my sin.

And it is this sin that Jesus declares forgiven. He says, “Father forgive them, they know not what they do.” And it is true: I do not know what I do. It is the height of presumption for me to assume that I know what I do. I do not know what I do, but nevertheless I do it. We all do it. But in laying the blame at the cross, I am assured of an overcoming mercy and grace. From the outcome of my sin of blaming and hating God, of seeking justice ultimately at His expense, it is not His death which prevails. It is His resurrection which prevails. He raises from the dead and finds us murderous and hiding and guilty and fearful and defeated and unfaithful, and breathes forgiveness upon us. Upon me.

The Weight of Belief – Lifted

In this hour, I do not have the strength or the stamina to go on carrying the weight of having to believe that God loves me and is blessing me. Even though I ought, even though it is greater to always give thanks, I cannot see it. I am blinded in my sense of rightness about what my life should be like, and what it is not. In this hour, God Himself will have to carry the weight of loving me without my help. I am too busy crucifying Him. But I believe that quite apart from me, He does love me. He does carry that weight. Quite without my help, He is raised from the dead with love in His heart for me. I have absolutely no confidence that I can depend on myself to be faithful, to even believe these things, to follow Him. As Nathaniel, my friend and prolific contributor to this site has noted, (and thank God for this) the risen Christ is unfollowable. He appears when and how He wishes, He does and speaks what He wishes, and He disappears. No one summons Him, no one controls Him, and no one follows Him. He does as He wishes. I believe He wishes to love us, as He has said.

In that sense I am in Christ. He is the vine, I am the branch. I have died, and it is Christ in me who is the hope of glory. He has come and made His abode in me, and all of my rage and anger and rejection is tiny and futile and fruitless in the face of such persistent and enduring love. I don’t have hope for glory in myself. In the end I can only seem to muster theocide. We say, no no no! I love God! It’s the first commandment. The new covenant says,

10 In this is love, not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins.

1Jo 4:10 NASB20

He is the resurrection and the life. I am not. We love because He first loved us (1 John 4:19 NASB). I do believe this. What shall separate us from the love of Christ (Romans 8:35-36)? Shall our guilt? Not that! (Romans 5:8). Shall famine or peril or sword? If it depended upon us, yes, it would separate us. But through Christ we are more than conquerors. It is not up to us, He is the faithful lover. He is Hosea and we are the whore He loves. It is not our faithfulness and obedience which is the show of glory to the authorities in the heavenly places (Ephesians 3:10 NASB). It is the wisdom and love of God towards us and in us that is the show of glory to them. God can take even those who hate Him and want to murder Him, and love them and make them the very centerpiece of His good intentions. This is our assurance, our security, our treasure. This is the great great love God has shown us. This is the astonishing and lavish grace of God. I am overwhelmed with gratitude for it, I truly do not deserve so great a gift.

• Category: Blog
• Tag: theocidal theology