Am I Going to Die Today?

Oh, you have thought it and quite possibly more than a dozen times. If you are suffering from any kind of chronic and debilitating disease, then you have thought “Am I Going to Die Today?” many times in the wee small hours of the morning.

The terror for me wasn’t the pain and the death. I had the assurance of heaven. However, I feared each day that my young children would be the ones to find me dead, traumatized for life by my departure. I feared the leaving the family who needed me, the kids who I needed to raise. I feared a job left undone. I feared even more so that death wouldn’t come and the suffering would get worse and never leave. Stuck there on the precipice of death itself but unable to let go.

I get it, now even more than before, that none of us are promised another day. Each day could be our last. But in suffering, those thoughts are amplified. Those thoughts drown out all other logic. Those deep dark death thoughts pierce through the hearing of every cell in your body until the resonance is chanting the echo of empty death back against your brain and heart.

I have a handful of Lyme friends who hear this echo now each day. They are in the season of the death echo. Each day they wonder if their bodies will be able to handle the pain and the healing. Should you go to the hospital? Is this the moment you need to be saved? Will the body make it through to another dawn? Is this the suffering that is too much? Is it?

I know you hear me. You are now weeping, as I am while typing this. The valley of the shadow of death is a thick blanket that torments the mind. How can the heart fight for life while the mind is comatose in the death echo? The heart is desperate to find Hope but it can barely hear itself think above the myriad of painful symptoms and the thump of the death echo coming from cells and organs all over the body and registering in the mind.

You have no one around who gets this. No one around you that doesn’t question your sanity because this is what torments your thoughts each day. You are not obsessed with death. You are not obsessed with dying. You are not giving into death. It has you in a vice grip and it holding you on the edge of a ledge you cannot step away from, cannot step back, cannot jump off. You just want the suffering to end. You just want to know that it is possible.

It is possible.

Read it again. It is possible. The suffering will end. The body can do amazing things. The body is given life each day from our Maker. It is He that gives us breath, healing and strength for another day.

There will be a day that you can smile. There will be a day for a belly laugh because you are long overdue. There will be a day for rejoicing and thankfulness. There will be a day for you to be off the ledge and hear no more echo of death.

You will be changed on that day. This suffering and death march alter the landscape of your thinking. Let it. Do not be paranoid about death and the suffering returning, but be grateful. Be grateful. Be grateful for the goodness and each good day and each new morning.