"The Pushy Friend"

I felt emotional today and I didn’t know what to do, so I decided to write it here. At church, the speaker talked about a few parables, one of which was the “pushy friend.” It’s a story from Luke about someone who knocks on their neighbor’s door and asks for some bread. The neighbor doesn’t answer the door but Jesus says to keep knocking. If you keep knocking, the neighbor will eventually answer and you’ll get what you came for.

I feel like I have been knocking for 15 months. I have prayed daily that God would take this from me. That I would wake up one day and this headache would be gone and it would soon be nothing but a memory. But every day I wake up and it’s still there. Maybe not as bad as it was yesterday, but also maybe worse than it was yesterday. Even if it does lift, I never feel normal. I can feel it in there, in its cage, angry that it’s locked up for now.

I don’t understand why God would leave someone by the pool for 40 years, begging to be healed. It seems like a waste of a life to me. I feel like the last year and a half of my life has been wasted. What’s the point? What is the point of being alive if you don’t feel well enough to enjoy it? Being sick is lonely. It’s so lonely. You don’t have the energy to go out and be social but you’re depressed because you’re not being social. What came first? The chicken or the egg? The depression from being sick or the sickness coming from depression?

Don’t get me wrong. There are good days. There have been plenty of good days. But my “good days” are a lot different than what I would have considered a good day a few years ago. I felt emotional thinking about these things during church. But I felt encouraged to keep knocking. To keep asking God to heal me, even if I don’t understand why he hasn’t already.

The pastor also had us do a little exercise. We had to think of a “3 a.m. friend” that we would call if something happened and we needed help - not a family member. I couldn’t really think of anyone, at least not in Colorado. We had to tell the person sitting next to us who we would choose and why. The lady next to me was so sweet and after the service, she gave me her number and told me she would be my 3 a.m. person. To call her if I needed anything. I could barely hold back my tears. I don't know that I'll ever call that lady, but I really appreciated it.