This morning I opened my eyes to gloomy skies, a heavy heart, and a tired body. I sat in my bed and stared out of my window, and the only prayer I could muster was, “Oh, God. I’m floundering today. Please help me.”

I stared at my dear little mini-orchid that seems to be moving into a season of dormancy now, and realized that it is a perfect illustration of how I feel right now. Tired, bent, ugly, dried up, and kind of useless. I now have two little orchids, and one has already settled into its dormant stage. There are two fairly fat buds on this one that offer tantalizing hope, but based on my experience with my first, now dormant orchid, those buds will probably never open and will eventually fall off of the drooping, drying stem. I’m no plant expert at all, and living with orchids is a new thing for me, so I’ve tried to research what’s going on and what to expect. I read this about orchid dormancy: 

“Orchid bloom loss and orchid dormancy are part of the regular life cycle of your orchid, when it rests between bloom cycles. Flowering plants don’t flower all the time, they need to take a break and rest before reblooming.” 

It looks useless and sad, but there is much life and preparation going on deep inside, and eventually, visual signs of that life will return as beloved blooms again. I am trying to learn to live in this new rhythm of up’s and down’s concerning my strength and function and ability to breathe well. That undulation naturally brings along with it an emotional component that can affect everything about each day and result in fear and despair. I’m trying to learn — failing sometimes and conquering other times — to ride these waves, searching for anything God has for me in them. If I can just remain open, there is continual growth in both the up’s and the down’s, and even in both the failing and the conquering. And God is with me through every new and mysterious step. I am not alone.

I finally finished my intentionally slow read through Vaneetha Rendall Risner’s book, The Scars that have Shaped Me, and decided this morning that I would start it again. I always find things I missed when I do a second read-through of an excellent book. The Foreword is written by Joni Eareckson Tada, another beautiful and very human person who has suffered, cried, and questioned God publicly, wrestled with him in the growth of her faith, and encouraged thousands of suffering people in their earthly walks. In this Foreword, she talks about the impossibility of living life as a quadriplegic over the past fifty years since a diving accident broke her neck when she was a teen: 

“It has everything to do with God and his grace that sustains — not just over the long haul, but grace given in tiny moments like stepping-stones leading you from one tick of the clock to the next. And the beauty of God’s grace is that it squeezes those hard moments together, eclipsing the years until one day you look over your shoulder and all you see is five decades of God at work. What you are left with is peace that’s profound, joy that’s unshakable, and faith that is ironclad. It is the hard but beautiful stuff of which God makes your life. Suffering is a strange, dark companion, nonetheless. It’s an unwelcome visitor, but still, a visitor. Affliction is a bruising of a blessing; but it is a blessing from the hand of God. It is how God meets us in our suffering.” 

I don’t know what’s ahead, but I am asking God to take me through each “tiny moment.”