A year ago tomorrow, I celebrated my fortieth birthday by mourning. I disappeared to a cabin by a lake with a college friend—the kind of friend who will sit with you in the ash heap and not say a word, much like Job's friends did after he suffered one devastating loss after another after another: "Then they sat on the ground with him... No one said a word to him because they saw how great his suffering was" (Job 2:13). There’s a photo of me from that weekend, still nearly bald, my face splotchy from crying, sporting a socially expected smile, holding up a funfetti cupcake on a plate, a single candle staked in the center, the flame alight. I looked and felt like a mess. I don’t know what I expected my fortieth birthday to look like, but it sure wasn’t that.
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Oh hey there, cancer. Thanks for ruining the party.
But sadly, I cannot blame you for my poor fashion choices. |
I was a sick healthy person. I was in the best shape of my life when I was diagnosed. Pound for pound, I was probably one of the strongest people in the gym. I had no underlying health conditions—or so I and everyone else thought. But my brain tumor had been there all along, as multiple doctors stated it had likely been growing for years, waiting, undetected. I literally had an underlying health condition, just centimeters beneath my skull. I was a mourning rejoicer on my fortieth birthday because I was rejoicing in the fact that I even lived to see the day after some hellacious months leading up to it, but mourning all that those months had cost me mentally, emotionally, and physically.
About a month after my diagnosis, I watched Katherine Wolf speak at IF: Gathering 2024. Katherine's life was upended at twenty-six when she suffered a cataclysmic stroke that left her permanently disabled. At that point in my own journey, I hadn't yet had the craniotomy, which wouldn’t come until another month after IF. As I listened to Katherine speak, I was struck by her use of the phrase “wounded healers."
I've rolled that phrase around in my heart for over a year now. Being wounded—aching with the hurts of this world—is not what sets Christians apart. All of humanity is bloodied, beaten, and bruised. We are all the walking wounded. However, as Christ-followers we do have a unique calling to be healers, even when we ourselves are wounded, for the Savior we serve is a wounded healer himself. Isaiah 53:4-6 paints this oxymoron of an identity:
Surely he took up our pain and bore our suffering; yet we considered him punished by God, stricken by him, and afflicted. But he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was on him, and by his wounds we are healed.
Christ is not just the King of the Jews (Matthew 27:37), but the King of Oxymorons, for he is both the chief wounded healer and the ultimate living sacrifice. And as image bearers of that same Christ, those identities must be our identities. We, too, are to be wounded healers and living sacrifices, as Romans 12:1 commands us, "Therefore, I urge you, brothers and sisters, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God—this is your true and proper worship."
We, too, are to be people of the oxymoron, a people called to live with incongruent identities.
We are sinful saints, for we are both sinful and yet saved, destined to join other saints in heaven.
"...for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God..." (Romans 3:23), but "For everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved” (Romans 10:13).
We are rich beggars, for we are both rich in Christ, heirs to his kingdom, and yet poor in spirit.
"Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven" (Matthew 5:3).
We are hungry feasters, for we are both spiritually hungry and yet we feast at the table of Christ.
"Come, everyone who thirsts, come to the waters; and he who has no money, come, buy and eat! Come, buy wine and milk without money and without price. Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread, and your labor for that which does not satisfy? Listen diligently to me, and eat what is good, and delight yourselves in rich food" (Isaiah 55:1-2).
We are afflicted comforters, for we are both afflicted in body and spirit and yet called to comfort others.
"Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our affliction, so that we may be able to comfort those who are in any affliction, with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God." (2 Corinthians 1:3-4).
The list could easily go on and on for we live in this upside down kingdom of God which abounds in oxymorons. I was pondering this reality anew at 5:14 a.m. this morning when I found myself lying in a hospital bed at the local urgent care as the result of pain in my toe that woke me from a dead sleep. (I am praying the remaining birthdays in my forties are not spent having some sort of complicated medical issue. I am unimpressed with the decade thus far.) I had the nail removed two weeks ago due to an ingrown toenail that under normal circumstances would have been removed back in March when it first started going squirrelly, but due to my blood counts and my platelets not clotting properly during treatment, we had to just keep babying the thing until after treatment was over and I could get it removed. Turns out the platelets have not rebounded like they should have and I am still having troubles clotting.
The urgent care physician mentioned in passing as she was standing nonchalantly at the foot of my bed, pressing a bandage to my toe trying to get it to stop bleeding, that she too had had cancer. And that's when it struck me afresh. Here was a walking embodiment of a wounded healer. The once sick now tending to the current sick. The once afflicted comforting the now afflicted.
This is to be our aim for those of us who claim the name of Christ and seek to follow him. Living in that space of incongruent identities is no small thing for it will demand much of us—and potentially take much from us. It is a place of deep discomfort and tension. Because it is easy to simply become only one part of the oxymoron.
We can be afflicted but choose not to leverage that pain to comfort others in their own afflicting.
We can be living but choose not to sacrifice for the good of others or to the glory of God.
We can feast to the exclusion of those around us who are hungry, whether physically or spiritually.
Similarly, we can be rich to the exclusion of those around us who lack in whatever form.
We can be sinful but never choose to move toward the salvation of Jesus Christ, whereby we will be perpetually begging, hungry, afflicted, and dead in an eternity apart from God.
Because in hell perhaps the chief oxymoron is that it is home of the undying dead, an oxymoron that can never be healed or undone once you arrive.
I pray that I am the kind of person who sits well in the tension of the contradictions, someone who seeks to follow the King of Oxymorons, even as I am the same changing person, being conformed to his image even as I walk in the brokenness of my sin.
