A Vein Hope

It's been a long time between posts, not because God isn't teaching me anything, but because the recent lessons have been quite hard for me to learn. Most of what I have been going through started back on December 18th of last year when a old friend sent me an e-mail alerting me to a story that had been aired on a Canadian news program about a new treatable condition called Chronic Cerebro-Spinal Venous Insufficiency (CCSVI) that might turn out be the cause of MS.

As of December 18th I had been diagnosed with MS for 4 years and 10 days.  Long enough to know what the words "chronic" and "incurable" mean.  Long enough to know that the word "hope" was not part of the lexicon.  Instead there were words like Rebif, Copaxone and Tysabri: dangerous medications that induce flu-like symptoms and must be delivered regularly with needles.  For the lucky, these medicines slow the accumulation of disabilities by a fraction.  The unlucky cannot tolerate them.  This was the prison that I had settled into for the duration.  A place of continual loss.  The dungeon of Everworse.

Then comes this news story.  A simple procedure to unblock my veins might relieve my MS?  The earth shook, walls cracked and light streamed in.  I resisted.  After all, who wants to be the fool.  Maybe this was a hoax.  Or maybe not.  Perhaps hope had arrived.  Hope of escape from Everworse.  Hope of better.

The past five months have been a roller-coaster of emotions.  A diagnosis and procedure that at first appeared within reach have been elusive due to politics and egos in the medical world.  Hope has come and gone several times as I have waited impatiently for the entrenched powers that be to become reluctantly convinced that their world is not as flat as they once supposed.   I have prayed and wondered about why. I have wondered about the nature of hope.  As all this swirled around in my head, I came across a song that I hadn't heard in a while.  The song is by Bob Bennett.  The melody is haunting, but it was the words that caught my attention:

Hope Like A Stranger

Hope like a stranger,
came to my door.
I was afraid. I was rude.
“What are you coming here for?”

“Have you come to stay,
Or are you just passing through?
I’ve seen your face,
But I do not know you.”

And he said, “You know me,
But I’ve had to remain,
Hidden in the shadows
Of your sorrows and pain.”

“For you have lived your life
As a slave so it seems,
Believing your nightmares
Instead of your dreams.”

Hope like a stranger,
Posed a question like a dare,
“Can you mask the mystery’s of your heart
Pretending not to care?”

“For the thing that you dismissed,
With your cynical facade,
Was the hope that you’d been given,
From the very heart of God.”

“And it drove you in secret,
And you held it close at bay.
And you tried to disown me,
But your not made to be that way.”

“And so I stand here longing,
For no matter where you run,
I will wait like the Father,
Of the prodigal son.”

He said, “Hope by itself,
It can never be an end,
It’s like holding paper money,
That’s impossible to spend.”

“Unless the value is a given,
The bargain’s incomplete.”
Then he showed me the scars,
On his hands and his feet.

I touched his wounds,
As I steadied my nerve.
He said, “I only bear the marks,
Of the Master I serve.”

“And He sends me here to tell you,
I am bound up with Him.
And you’d do well when He comes,
To also let Him in.

Hope like a stranger,
Came to my door.
But He’s risen and He stays,
A stranger no more.

Hope had definitely been a stranger to me for the last several years.  So much so that I did not know how to react to it.  But now I had hope!  Hope in a new medical procedure to rid me of MS.  But as I listened to the lyrics over and over I realized that hope had not been absent for these four years, I had just misplaced it.  As a child of God I had lost sight of reality.  I had focused my gaze on the walls of my disease-prison.  But that was not reality, rather, just a temporary place in space and time.  Reality was, and is, God's love for me.  God's love is more real than all of my circumstances.  God's love is reason to hope.

I am increasingly convinced that CCSVI is real and that this new medical procedure holds great promise for people with MS.  But my hope should have been in the love of God for me and not so quickly dismissed in the presence of suffering and disappointment.  Hope should never have become a stranger, as a child of God, hope should have been my constant companion all along. 

"For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor any other created thing, will be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord."- Romans 8:37-39 (NASB)

Now I know that hope in any other thing is just a vein hope.