
“They found a severe facet degenerative disease,” he explains, “caused by degenerative changes to the joints between the spine bones. The cartilage inside the facet joint can break down and become inflamed, triggering pain signals.” He is saying something about how vertebra is slipping backward on one another, how “chronic appearing anterior wedging” is something that happens “when the vertebrae in the spine break down from some form of trauma.”
Trauma. My face twists. I stare at him hard. He feels all of this, I only feel words. I gulp and try to swallow these long, de-gen-er-a-tive words before picking up my book. My dad is not in pain. My dad is not in pain.
“Belief in God has to be more than mental assent, more than a cliched exercise in cognition. What is saving belief if it isn’t the radical dare to fully trust?” Ann Voskamp writes in One Thousand Gifts.
And this is the part many people ask, “How could there be a God when this!”
I am good at denial.
My sister comes home on Good Friday wearing a white square on her chest I haven't seen before. “I’m quitting smoking!” She laughs out the lie, but it's worse than that. Her heart stopped beating this week. Cause unknown. A 19-year-old; healthy, busy, dating. Six seconds – flatlined.
Familia trauma.
Break, trigger, slip.
Disintegrate.
White bruises, water
flatlined.
Blood. Thorns…
Crucifixion is such an ugly word. I think about how veins mimic twiggy forest trees. My mind then moves beyond nature's exterior and deeper into the human body, of a certain crown of thorns and its mirror to the human arteries. How is Christ's crucifixion so curiously relevant? Must there really be death for that little seed to breathe? How can we, the degenerated and palpitating, live in death?

It’s a paradox blinding some, saving me. Often do we give up in suffering, compared to Jesus' words: “Do you think for a minute I’m not going to drink this cup the Father gave me?”*
“Because His heart was filled with the joy of knowing that you would be His, He endured the agony of the Cross and conquered its humiliation, and now sits exalted at the right hand of the throne of God …” (Hebrews).
Why would He do this for us? The J word. The one we associate with ice cream and sunshine. That couldn't mean today. Not in my family. Not for me.
That's why the paradox shocks. Christ endured the cross because of the joy of knowing you would be with him. This is the ultimate act of love, the fulfillment we so long to drink! Except this kind of love is graphic and damaging, ripping, pulsing our souls to intimacy incomprehensibly beyond human interpretation of religious tradition. Some of us are basing our whole eternity on a book we’ve never fully read because the presentation of Salvation was served in an unflattering platter.
Give up denial.
I reread, this time unraveling love with my squinting eyes. “Belief in God has to be more than mental assent…” But now my mind wanders even further: how can one even consider a God in suffering, choosing to believe He is what a God would be – the Omnipotent, Omnipresent, Alpha and Omega?
I’ve reached Proverbs now, on my way to Revelation, tracing with a black pen the connections of Old stories and the ones I know of the New. I have to read all of it. And as I read I see…
how can one not choose?
Gone is the luxury of risking forgetting to think about death, guaranteed 100%, as something that may or may not lead to another life. Would this feared capsule not take us somewhere any less diluted than how real we know chills and stings, as if this doorway to death, the scariest, most real part of our cognitive journey is simply a commute to nowhereland? Is death truly the climax and conclusion, some painful and memorable happenstance that every living thing faces inevitably, something humans gnaw, scream, and stare at with fear and fascination? Does not evil foreshadow our ultimate nightmare, and our greatest joys, an ultimate heaven?
This is a heart problem. A bloody issue. A bone and joint strewn tendency to lock up and ignore what we can't explain (or would rather not try). So some believe and some do not, and all find out eventually. To not believe is to believe in the end of me, that after this life, goodbye, in all degenerative ways, forever. Alea iota est. To not believe in the Resurrection is to deny the ‘happily ever after’ philosophy, or to illogically believe that in some way it can still exist without this outside-of-time death so essential to both character and story arch. A happy ending is something we may confusingly feel entitled to as we are repeatedly disappointed. But we need not be embarrassed. Am I surprised the sun still rises? I know how stories work.
Take the Easter account to abstract form and consider that life may be the mother of these plots we know, where battles are won and lost yet every story reaches a sky-foreseen conclusion of good and evil. We don’t lament the antagonist’s fate though he believed he did something right. Think about this in relation to the triggering grips of fear and death in our own lives. We live as though we assume truth is subjective, faith is extracurricular, life is a dream. But see this beginning, middle, and end plot as something you can course. Denial could set yourself up for a tragic ending.
My sister sits down at the Yamaha bench and flattens her silky shirt. The tiny white square peaks out at her neckline. “I'd like to play a new song I wrote. It's called Bleed Your Love.” She sings about Christ’s crucifixion and our wandering search in life for the satisfaction of healing. She can press the dot on the white button whenever she feels it is happening again. When she feels like she is dying.
It is not an ‘even’ when the spine twists and the heart stops. It is ‘because’ that we’re compelled to believe in the love of God.
My father's does not keep me from Christ's love, it propels me forward face first.
My father's pain reminds me of Christ.
That is why I keep reading what happened on Good Friday until it breaks my own bones and wets my cheeks. And I won't stop because it gloriously affects my future silent Saturdays and even past death.
The rejection of ultimate love is the acceptance of ultimate loss. Deny it, crumple it, throw it in fire. Just as the laws of gravity cannot be reversed so Christ's death cannot be undone. It is there. It will always be there. And it is true for you, too, if you accept.
What if you, too, you read God’s words cover to cover? What if today’s crisis – your death – is Friday, and your waiting silence, Saturday… and tomorrow – ?
*John 18:11, The Message Translation.
Amen. His sacrifice was the ugliest and most beautiful reality.