“My bones suffer mortal agony as my foes taunt me,
saying to me all day long,
‘Where is your God?’"
Maybe I have it too—I’d like to think not, but who
knows? When first we were married and
living in
I went to see a doctor—we’d just moved so someone I’d never seen before. He took some tests, shrugged his shoulders, and said that I needed someone to tell me I wasn’t sick. Which he did. End of symptoms. I am my mother’s child.
Maybe depression—his deep sense of alienation from God—is the occasion for his physical ailments. Maybe he’s got thyroid problems, a frequent association. Maybe he had some chronic pain—an old war injury—before he felt “down in the dumps.” Chronic pain often accompanies or even triggers depression.
My sisters and I often shook our heads in wonder at our long-suffering father, who always appeared to believe my mother’s phantom pains were real. He must have learned—as we had to—that denying those pains was never going to get him or her anywhere because what Mom felt in her bones—real or not—was always real.
Good doctors will admit that we are all more than the sum of our physical parts. In hospitals all over the world, miracles still happen; and we call them that because we don’t know—nobody does—how human will intersects with our physicality. Today, I stumble around with neuropathy, looking for magic cures. I'm ready to try CBD.
That’s why I believe David's testimony, even though I’m a life-long scoffer. The pain he felt in being seemingly abandoned by God crept, cancer-like, into every atom of his fiber. He could feel the presence of God’s absence in his bones, in his cartilage.
I don’t think it’s overstatement. God seemed gone, and that pain, to him, was real—as it can be to us, hypochondriacs all.
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