Elusive Healing

“Elusive Healing”

Excerpt from Chapter Three of Hurting Yet Whole by Liuan Huska

I sat on a stone bench in a little park near our apartment one September, journaling. It had been about three months since my ankle pain started. Yellow and orange marigolds fanned out in arcs around the paved central plaza, where a tiered fountain invited children to reach in and fish for wishing coins. The sunlight landed playfully on my back and the tree leaves flaunted a green so alive it danced, and you could almost see the chlorophyll being produced. Joggers challenged their muscles, awash in endorphins from exertion; parents pushed babies with fat, wiggly toes in strollers; and creation delighted in its own existence.

I gazed intently, willing some of the beauty to seep into my soul, and bathe my body in comfort, but the park seemed a separate world from the one I was living internally. I didn’t feel part of the loveliness I saw. Instead, the vitality and movement around me heightened my lack thereof. I was, in the words of Grace, a young woman with chronic migraines, “watching life from the sidelines.”

My pain wasn’t getting better. I’d seen an orthopedic doctor. I’d tried crutches. I’d tried not walking, then walking. I’d tried Tiger Balm, heat, ice, kinesiology tape, and elevation. I kept limping back to this park every few days, watching summer melt into autumn as the leaves turned yellow, orange, red, and brown and drifted downward. Here, I spilled my woes into my journal, a jumble of urgent pleas to God, then patience and resignation, then more desperation:

I’m trusting you, God, for my foot to heal, and accepting a time of rest for my body in the meantime.

I feel like I’m on the verge of a state of depression. It’s hard to get out of bed in the morning and do things because I can’t really walk or be on my feet for long. God.

Please show me that you’re real. Please answer my prayers.

I am doing all I can to let my foot heal. The rest is up to You.

I’ve finally accepted that this injury is going to take a long time to heal, trying to focus on the things I can do and enjoy, rather than the things I can’t.

Here I am again, Lord. What do you want from me? Something feels desolate and parched within me. Restore unto me the joy of your salvation. I long to find a seed of hope in this wasteland of my unmet expectations.

It went on like this for months. I cried out for healing. I bopped around to doctors and tried one treatment after another. I went up for prayer in church, made appointments with prayer ministers, and asked my friends to pray. All I wanted was for things to go back to normal, to the way they were before the pain. Was that too much to ask—to be able to walk?