Something Good Lies Ahead
by Philip Yancey
The Christian believes that, no matter how bleak things look at the present, something good really does lie ahead. Bruno Bettelheim, survivor of Hitler’s camps, acknowledges that such belief translates into actual help: “It is a well-known fact of the concentration camps that those who had strong religious and moral convictions managed life there much better than the rest. Their beliefs, including belief in an afterlife, gave them a strength to endure which was far above that of most others.”

Joni Eareckson Tada tells of a time when she visited a home for the mentally retarded. Usually when she visits a care facility and recounts her life story, speaking from a wheelchair, she keeps her audience spellbound. These patients, however, of varying ages but all with undeveloped minds, had trouble with attention span. When Joni reached the part about imagining what heaven would be like, she could tell she had lost their interest entirely.

It was a warm day, and Joni could feel perspiration rolling down her body as she struggled to continue. Finally, in desperation, she said this, “And heaven will be the place where all of you will get new minds.” As soon as the words came out, she regretted them—what if they sounded paternalistic, or cruel? But instantly the atmosphere in the room changed. Spontaneously, the patients started cheering, with loud applause.

Joni had tapped into their deepest hope. They, more than anyone, knew their minds were incomplete, unfulfilled. But she had held out the Christian promise of a place where such weaknesses would not carry over, a place of final healing. “But our citizenship is in heaven,” Paul reminded the Philippians (3:20–21). “And we eagerly await a Savior from there, the Lord Jesus Christ, who, by the power that enables him to bring everything under his control, will transform our lowly bodies so that they will be like his glorious body.”

We Western Christians in our increasing sophistication have, I think, grown a little ashamed of our faith’s emphasis on immortality and rewards to come. I hear few sermons these days on the crown of life or crown of righteousness. Our culture announces to us that suffering is the reality and an afterlife of immortality is just a pipe dream.

But do we have any other sure hope to offer for the quadriplegic or the mother of a brain-damaged baby? And is the hope of an afterlife and eternal healing a worthy hope? To answer that question, I must tell you the story of Martha, one of the members of the Make Today Count group. In a sense, her story summarizes everything I learned about pain in my year with the group.

Martha caught my eye at the very first meeting. Other people there showed obvious symptoms of illness: thinning hair, a sallow complexion, a missing limb, an uncontrolled trembling. But Martha showed no such signs. She was twenty-six, and very attractive. I wondered if she, like me, was visiting with a friend.

When it was Martha’s turn to speak, she said she had just contracted ALS, or Lou Gehrig’s disease. Her father had died of the same disease a year before, and two years before that her uncle had died of it. ALS rarely shows hereditary connections, and very rarely attacks young women, but somehow she had cruelly defied the odds.

ALS destroys nerves. It first attacks voluntary movements, such as control over arms and legs, then hands and feet. It progresses on to involuntary movements, and finally inhibits breathing enough to cause death. Sometimes a person’s body succumbs quickly, sometimes not. Martha’s relatives had lived through two years of degeneration before death. Martha knew the disease’s pattern in excruciating detail.

My first meeting with the group took place in March. In April, Martha arrived in a wheelchair. She could walk only with great difficulty, and because of that had just been fired from her job at a university library.

By May Martha had lost use of her right arm, and could no longer use crutches. A physical therapist had taught her to pick things up off the floor by using a broomstick-and-masking-tape contraption. She operated the manual wheelchair with great difficulty.

By June she had lost use of both arms and could barely move the hand controls on a new electric wheelchair. Needing round-the-clock care, she moved into a rehabilitation hospital.

I began visiting Martha at her rehabilitation hospital. I took her for short rides in her wheelchair, and sometimes picked her up for the group meetings. I learned about the indignity of her suffering. I learned to check her toes before putting on her shoes—if they were curled, they would jam painfully in the shoe—and to close her hand and guide it carefully into the sleeve of her jacket. I also had to watch for her dangling arms before setting her down on the car seat. It is not easy to position a 125-pound body of dead weight inside a compact car.

Martha needed help with every move: getting dressed, arranging her head on the pillow, cleaning her bedpan. When she cried, someone else had to wipe her tears and hold a tissue to her nose. Her body was in utter revolt against her will. It would not obey any of her commands.

Sometimes we talked about death and about hope. I confess to you readily that the great Christian hopes of eternal life, ultimate healing, and resurrection sounded hollow and frail and thin as smoke when held up to someone like Martha. She wanted not angel wings, but an arm that did not flop to the side, a mouth that did not drool, and lungs that would not collapse. I confess that eternity, even a pain-free eternity, seemed to have a strange irrelevance to the suffering Martha felt.

She thought about God, of course, but she could hardly think of him with love. She held out against any deathbed conversion, insisting that, as she put it, she would only turn to God out of love and not out of fear. And how could she love a God who did this to her?

It became clear around October that ALS would complete its horrible cycle quickly in Martha. She soon had to practice breathing with a toy-like plastic machine, blowing with all her might to make little blue balls rise in the pressure columns. Between gasps for breath, she talked about what she preferred losing first, her voice or her breath. Ultimately she decided she would rather her lungs quit first; she preferred dying to dying mute, unable to express herself.

Because of reduced oxygen supply to her brain, Martha tended to fall asleep in the middle of conversations. Sometimes at night she would awake in a panic, with a sensation like choking, and be unable to call for help.

Despite logistical difficulties, Martha managed to make one last trip to a favorite summer cabin in Michigan, and to her mother’s home nearby. She was making final preparations, saying farewells.

In that process, Martha badly wanted at least two weeks back in her own apartment in Chicago as a time to invite friends over, one by one, in order to say good-bye and to come to terms with her death. But the two weeks in her apartment posed a huge problem. How could she stay at home in view of the need for round-the-clock care? Some government aid could be found to keep her in a hospital room, but not at home, not with the intensive service she needed just to stay alive.

Only one group in all of Chicago offered the free and loving personal care that Martha needed: Reba Place Fellowship, a Christian community in Evanston. Included among the members of Reba Place was a paraplegic named Sara who knew well the agony of living in a body that did not function properly. Partly due to Sara’s influence, the entire community adopted Martha as a project and volunteered all that was necessary to fulfill her last wishes.

Sixteen women rearranged their lives for her. They divided into teams, adjusted their schedules, traded off baby-sitting duties for their own children, and moved into her apartment, one pair per shift. Seventeen other people signed on as a support team to pray for Martha and the care-givers. They prayed for her miraculous healing, but they also prayed for those who would minister to her if the disease continued its deadly course.

The sixteen women stayed with Martha, listened to her ravings and complaints, bathed her, helped her sit up, moved her, sat beside her all night to listen to her breathing, prayed for her, and loved her. They were available to calm her fears. They gave her a sense of place so that she no longer felt helpless, and gave meaning to her suffering. To Martha they were God’s body.

The Reba Place women also explained to Martha the Christian hope. And finally Martha, seeing the love of God enfleshed in his body—at a time when God himself seemed to her uncompassionate, even cruel—came to that God in Christ. She presented herself in trust to the one who had died for her. She did not come to God in fear; she had found his love at last. In a very moving service in Evanston, she feebly gave a testimony and was baptized.

On the day before Thanksgiving of 1983, Martha died. Her body, crumpled, misshapen, atrophied, was a pathetic imitation of its former beauty. When it finally stopped functioning, Martha left it. But today Martha lives, in a new body, in wholeness and triumph. She lives because of the victory that Christ won and because of his body at Reba Place, who made that victory known to her. And if we do not believe that, and if our Christian hope, tempered by sophistication, does not allow us to offer that truth to a dying, convulsing world then we are indeed, as the apostle Paul said, of all men most miserable.

From Where Is God When It Hurts? by Philip Yancey