I lay naked under the hospital sheet, clad only in the hospital issued, diaper-like underwear. Nurses pushed my bed down the hall, cheerfully chatting amongst themselves and others we encountered. I felt my smallness, my vulnerability as I waited for them to look down and meet my eyes. Physical positioning immediately creates a power differential— lying beneath their gaze emphasized a feeling of raw dependence. I am quiet, waiting for them to initiate communication, feeling ravenously thankful when they are kind.
I know others have far more experience with this than do I—the feeling of utter vulnerability and helplessness, when you place your well-being at the hands of a group of strangers. In fact, this state is almost the exact opposite of much of my life which has been characterized with independence, self-reliance, and a competitive bent of ‘mind over matter’. This has enabled me to push through the pain of climbing mountains and enduring mental, emotional, and physical challenges. But in the end, grit and determination take you only so far— and the expected guarantees unconsciously associated with the outcomes of this mindset have been slowly crumbling for some time. In fact, these covert beliefs were rather abruptly exposed in January when I took a simple fall on some ice while out hiking.
My mind told me to get up and keep moving, laugh it off and carry on. But my body revolted as my heart rate increased, and I became light headed, suddenly feeling as if I would pass out or throw up. Dizzily, I sat down. ‘What is happening?’ I thought. My mind again ordered my body to obey, an unsympathetic general to her foot soldiers. My body revolted and sat down again.
My mind persisted in its stubbornness—it would be three days before I went to the emergency room to discover my right hand was broken and I needed surgery. My first surgery induced profound stress, and the feeling of helplessness was elongated by the fact that I was in my second culture navigating unfamiliar hospital norms in my second language. Further, I decided to request a different surgeon as I wasn’t comfortable with my assigned surgeon. On the day of my surgery, I lay in my hospital bed with seven white-jacketed doctors staring down at me as my surprising request interrupted their morning rounds.
‘Are you insisting on this?’ one asked, looking at me slightly shocked.
‘Yes,’ I answered. I longed for an assurance that my request would be granted, so that I could feel some measure of certainty before going into surgery, but the team merely said, ‘We will see,’ as they left my room. In fact, I did not know who did my surgery until a couple of days afterwards when I was checked by the surgeon I had requested.
‘The Lord is at my right hand and I will not be moved,’ I kept murmuring to myself as they wheeled me into surgery. Was I abusing the interpretation of this verse? Frankly, at that moment I didn’t much care if I was, and I continued repeating it as the kind anesthesiologist exclaimed at my thick skin that bent her needle while she attempted to numb the nerves in my shoulder.
My second surgery a few months later to removed the screws and titanium plate promised to be much simpler and quicker. Still, once again I experienced the sense of profound helplessness as I was wheeled through the hallways.
There are certain experiences in life that can act like a theater curtain being drawn back, revealing the play to the audience. Being put in a state of helplessness is one such experience. Who am I when my self-reliance and self-determination are taken away, when my ‘performance’ as a cause is severed from the result, revealing loss of control?
The last couple years, these experiences of feeling helpless have been occurring with greater frequency—an experience I had at a border crossing, the pandemic, breaking my hand. But are they really happening more frequently or am I just more attune to how little I can actually control? In fact, the experiences have taught me the folly and futility of focusing on performance in my spiritual life and ministry life.
Attending to your response when you are helpless unmasks your actual theology, not just what you think you think. A ‘non-helpless’ person has a hard time experiencing grace—not just knowing about grace—but the feeling of something unexpected and undeserved when you truly cannot reciprocate.
Experiencing helplessness is a required experiential state to shift our compass and properly orientate us in our life with God [for while we were still helpless, at the right time, Christ died for us], but it is also critical to enlarging our compassion for the Other, those who are in a constant state of helplessness against the ‘powers’—refugees, people suffering in war, drought, extreme poverty, women experiencing violence with little recourse for safety, children in untenable situations.
It is hard to accept my helplessness, but it is likely the key to experiencing the peace that passes all understanding.
Balkan Voices 