“It gets better.” Twice recently I have been challenged on this statement. I understand why. When you live with a condition or life circumstance that causes you chronic pain and suffering at best this can sound like a glib, easy response from others who don’t understand the perseverance and depth of your pain, allowing them to feel better, at worst it can sound like a dismissal of your experience, a minimising of the extent of your suffering. Attempts to bless can become a curse so easily in the mouth of someone who has not taken the time to truly listen and try to understand your pain.
The challenge to “it gets better,” is a challenge from a
place of pain and deserves a tender and thoughtful response. For sufferers of
long-term, chronic pain, mental or physical, false hope can feel like a bitter
lie, a glass of water just outside of your reach in the desert, a callous
reminder of there being no escape for you although there is for others, a
fearful warning that the patience of others may one day expire, even at times a
condemnation of your failure to get better.
However, in spite or even because of this I will defend hope to my last breath and without compromise. I will give 3 reasons why I believe whoever we are and whatever we face we can in some measure appropriate “it gets better” for ourselves and then explain why I think it is absolutely essential that we do.
1. Your suffering will not always be this bad. Miley Cyrus was on the radio today talking about her new single and one of the lyrics in it that means the most to her. She talks about the way that we torment ourselves with forever. Almost everyone with a chronic condition, or even a deteriorating one, has times of better and worse. Even if better lasts a day, or an hour or a minute, there are moments that are slightly less horrendous. And at the moment when the pain is so bad it feels unendurable, hope says, it will not always be like this. This may return, it may even get worse, but it will not always feel exactly like this.
Even if it is temporary, even if it is incomplete, there will be a break in the clouds, a breath of fresh air, a candle in the darkness, a moment of peace. And, in particular, the situation that feels right now like a car crash catastrophe that is all you can see or think about will certainly not always feel like this. Everything changes. Nothing in this life is permanent, and if that is true for good things that we cannot hang on to, it is also true for the awful things we fear we can never escape.
Can I say just how important this is to believe and hold onto for people with BPD. We who experience BPD are so prone to black and white thinking. Pain creates a tunnel of darkness that seems to be without end. It is so easy to believe that how I feel right now is all I have ever felt and all I will ever feel. But it isn’t. Good days happen. Good weeks even. With help we can escape from situations that trigger us and there are people out there who will show us the love and kindness that we crave, even just for a moment. It gets better does not mean it gets perfect or it never gets worse again. But it does mean it gets better than this.
2. There is always hope for change. Although BPD can often be used as a punishment diagnosis or feel like an excuse to chuck people into the scrap bin, condemning them to a lifetime of untreatable anguish and inability to function, this is not true. The Bible insists that while we are not guaranteed healing from any or all diseases and damage, over time - and sometimes a very, very long time - the way we experience suffering can be transformed. The pain may never get better, but I can find purpose in it, comfort.
And most importantly, to the extent that my suffering is exacerbated by my own sinful responses to it – something that is true of every single person who has ever lived apart from Jesus – as I learn to walk with the Lord, to ask him to show me my hidden faults, to believe his truth over the lies of my heart and mind and the lies of the world and others, to renounce the idols I am living for which fail me so relentlessly and cause me such pain in the failure, it can and will get better. God is in the business of changing all of us. Having BPD does not exempt us. We may always face crisis, panic, pain, brokenness, but we are not condemned to being stuck in the same place forever. The Holy Spirit is at work. It can get better.
3. There is eternal hope. One day he will wipe every tear from our eye, we will be his people, he will be our God, we will live in perfect, unbroken relationship with our bodies, other people and the Lord. Because of the Lord Jesus’ work for us on the cross, our eternal hope is secure and unyielding. One day there will be no more pain, no more brokenness, no more heartbreak, no more struggle. There will be perfect rest, perfect peace, perfect wholeness. We will be exactly who we were made to be and we will experience perfect love as we meet face to face with our Lord.
Even if pain in this life was constant and without hope of change, we can persevere, knowing something better is coming and it will redeem every drop of agony we sweat and transform it through God’s incomparable goodness into blessing. In the Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, a character lives by the motto, “It will be OK in the end. If it is not OK, it is not the end.” The transforming, joyful, hope-drenched truth of the gospel is that this aphorism is true. In the end it will indeed be OK. Before the throne of the lamb, surrounded by the presence of the Lord it will be better.
So why do I insist upon hope? Why will I not compromise on “it
gets better”?
Firstly, because I know the power of it in my own life. The
older I get the better I get at enduring pain simply because I have learned to
remind myself that it gets better. It may take an hour, or a week or a year or
a decade, but things immediately become less unendurable as soon as they have the
hope of an end.
Secondly, because if we believe it gets better, we act in
ways that make it better. Telling ourselves “always” and “forever” tend to cut
off attempts to improve our situation. What is the point? There’s no hope. And
yet, when we let hope push us to keep trying, trying once more to trust
someone, once more to put yourself out there, once more to cast your cares on
the Lord, once more to cry out to him in prayer for relief, one more
counsellor, one more treatment, one more leap of faith, it is in the trying that
the capacity for better happens.
Thirdly, whenever the Bible talks about how we endure
suffering it talks about hope. In fact, I would argue that there is no way to
endure suffering in a way that can have meaning or dignity or purpose without
hope. There is no way to persevere in suffering as a Christian without the firm
knowledge that it gets better. Christ has died for us and has secured our place
in heaven, so as we run through the difficulties of this life, we run for a prize
that can never perish, spoil or fade. We cannot be separated from the love of Christ,
he has overcome every possible power in heaven and on earth than can separate us
from him, even our own sin and God’s own wrath. He intercedes for us, God’s own
precious son, pleads his own precious blood on our behalf. He gives us his
Spirit to transform us more and more into the likeness of the Lord, promising change
as we seek and submit to him. The Bible points us relentlessly to hope, because
we are creatures of hope. We cannot endure this life without it. But with it,
our experience of suffering becomes transformed.
The Lord Jesus endured the worst suffering we can imagine.
He was slandered, misunderstood, dismissed, betrayed by those he loved the
most, beaten, mocked, humiliated, shamed, homeless, hungry, condemned and murdered
and the wrath of God was poured out upon him in our place, his eternal
relationship of perfect love was broken through no fault of his own. How did he
endure? How was he able to persevere in obedience to the Father? Hebrews tells
us, “for the joy set before him”. Because of hope.
Despair lives in the darkness. Despair holds us in the darkness.
But despair is a lie of the devil. However hard it can be to believe it, however
painful hope can be, ultimately despair does not win. God is in the business of
hope. However dark it seems right now, I stand by my statement, I insist on it,
I will believe it for you when the dark gets too overwhelming and you can’t. If
you trust the Lord, you are not condemned to suffer indefinitely. It might not
be on the timescale we prefer or the way we want it. But absolutely, unequivocally,
indisputably, I will fight to be dying breath to affirm, “it gets better”.
