“Not My Will”

[This post is based upon a Lenten post from 2020.]

How many times have I begged for my life of progressive disease and severe disability to be different?

When I was a teenager, hormones raging, I would agonize for hours wanting a different path. Far too weak and dependent for romantic relationships, I deeply desired the possibility of a husband, of children, of a home of my own. Painfully sorrowful and frustrated, I begged God to release me from the crippling confines of my disease. I begged God for the path of my life to change.

In sleepless nights even now, in my 40s, I suffer the agony of simply wanting to swing my legs down from the bed and stand up. I don’t want to be dependent upon my aging parents and wake them in the middle of the night for my comfort, no matter how willing they may be to assist me. So I lie still and wide-awake in the dark, miserable, as tears sting and burn my eyes — I can’t even wipe them away with my own hands. I don’t want my disability, this difficult burden of sorrow and painful loss. I don’t want disease to lie heavily upon me and upon the backs and hearts of the people whom I love.

This is not my will.

God knows.

Turning to Jesus

The life that God chose to live here in the flesh was a simple life of affection and health that was enjoyed by Him, body, mind, heart, and soul — until it wasn’t. Jesus, who is fully divine, knew that the path of His life was heading toward betrayal, abandonment, cruelty, and horrific torture culminating in His painful crucifixion. He knew that this path meant that He, Our Savior, could free us, His beloved, from the ravages of sin … but that doesn’t mean that He liked the path.

Christ didn’t always feel happiness about His own fully human life, and He certainly didn’t want to suffer excruciating pain. In fact, knowing what He was about to endure, what His life was about to become, Jesus, filled with agonizing dread, fell to His knees in the dark of night and begged to be released from the divine plan. His human will cried out for a different path.

God in the flesh intimately knows my heartbreaking, bone-aching desire for the course of life to change, because He suffered it too.

Christ begged for another way.

Jesus did not go dancing to His executioners. He agonized between what His human will desired and what His divine will required. With every innocent human emotion, He wanted the course of His human life to change, understandably begging “Let this cup pass from me!” Struggling miserably in His dread, and even fear, of the torture that He was about to experience, Jesus sweated drops of blood.

He who is without sin, whose intellect is not darkened, whose will is not weakened, loves me enough to go through everything that I go through in the painful, perishable nature of human flesh. God chose to be intimately united to me in the flesh, permanently cementing His bond with me through His own blood and tears. God profoundly loves me in this terribly beautiful intimacy that is the very human and divine life of Jesus Christ. He sweats it out with me, falling to His knees, pouring out His very blood for love of me. In His very real agony, He suffers what I suffer — what you suffer — uniting us to Him and giving Himself completely to us, so that He may abide in us, and we may abide in Him now and forever. So that we will never escape the transformative power of His eternal love.

Though I die with Him, I will rise with Him.

Walking with Christ

Reflecting upon the suffering of Christ, I don’t believe that God is telling me that I need to like my disease, disability, and dependency, that I need to be happy about it as many Saints seem to have been happy with suffering. Christ clearly wasn’t happy about His path of suffering. We call it “The Agony in the Garden” for a reason. What God is telling me, I believe, as He tells each and every one of us, is that He is truly suffering with me. Whenever I turn to Christ in my sufferings, even in the depths of my miseries, letting God love me fully and intimately, my agony becomes part of the pathway to my eternal fulfillment as a divinely beautiful creature of love.

I follow Him to Paradise.

It has become obvious that God’s will for me is that I not be miraculously cured of my genetic disease. His will is different than mine. Will I accept His will, even if I don’t like it? … Yes. Grateful for the gift of life, for my existence, I will not perpetually complain to the Giver, who is all-knowing and ever-loving. When fear comes, I will not turn away from God. When misery, dread, and agony comes, I will remember that He is suffering right beside me. God knows that there’s nothing about this difficult life of mine that will prevent me from knowing the fullness of love and joy. If this way of living is the only way that I, Christina Marie Chase, unique and one-of-a-kind, can live in this world, then I certainly would choose this life over no life at all.

Whenever I experience grief over my life or the desire for relief, or when I fear what the future may bring, I pray that I will always turn to Christ, who felt and experienced my agony as He trembled and prayed, fervently yearning and begging in the Garden of Gethsemane. As He suffered with me in love, may I now surrender with Him and to Him in love … oh, Lord … and mean it when I say His words: “Not my will, but Thy will be done.”

© 2024 Christina Chase

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Feature Photo by Camila Quintero Franco on Unsplash