Doors and Diagnosis

I don’t know where to begin.

I can say with certainty that doors are very difficult now.

If I say anything else it will be an understatement. Because there is no way to share the days and weeks of driving to doctor’s appointments, rolling down hallway after hallway, enduring painful and scary tests. Learning a new normal daily as the situation worsened. But I know that many of you know this in your own lives so I don’t need to say these things.

If I say anything else it will be an unknown. The doctors tell me I had a complication from my injury that they didn’t catch in time. Nerves and veins were compressed, muscles deprived of blood-flow and oxygen. Now I have no function above the knee and little below it in my left leg. They hope it will get better with therapy, but cannot tell me how much I may recover, and the timeframe they give me is years.

And this is the good news, because although they can not say with absolute certainty, they don’t think we need to test further for diseases that would take over the rest of my body or kill me.

So I am learning among other things how to prop a door slightly ajar, and pull myself through. I am learning to swallow my shock and injured pride when others run to open the door for me, and just tell them thank you.

But I got stuck inside a door at Starbucks. I’m not sure how it happened except that these things do happen when you can’t use your leg and are making your way through the world in a chair for the first time. Just utterly, completely stuck until someone came over and easily swung the door wide, freeing me. I said thank you and hastily retreated to my car.

It made me think about that cliche saying (not from the Bible) “When God closes a door, he opens a window.”

I do not think I could climb out a window in my present state, and although God is the first cause, the mover of movers, I am not so sure that He is the one who closes doors. He is good and loving and nowhere have I rolled in my wheelchair to have a kind person slam a door in my face – so why would He?

I do not know how the theology for this assumption of mine works out. I don’t care.

What I do know is that there are many doors, and maybe the one I am being forced to travel through leads to somewhere I was not thinking of, choosing, or planning to go. But maybe God is holding it wide open so that I do not get stuck, and my only job is to roll on through and say thank you as He promises to be right by my side, to be all-encompassing even in the midst of this very broken world.

. . .

“Joy does not come from positive predictions about the state of the world. It does not depend on the ups and downs of the circumstances of our lives. Joy is based on the spiritual knowledge that, while the world in which we live is shrouded in darkness, God has overcome the world.”

-Henri J. M. Nouwen in Here and Now