Feel free to remind me there is no shame...

It's over ... for now.  This innards battle began around 5 a.m. and continued until shortly after 9:00 p.m., the pattern they were before I tried the erythoromycin a second time.  It is one thing to face the pain and nausea and writhing, waiting for the diarrhea that will end it, even though that comes with its own set of miseries, for 4-5 hours, but the battles had stretched to half a day and more.  They finish with this strange blend of fatigue and fragility and shame.

Just now, I reached out to a sister in Christ who told me it is no shame to call upon the Lord, even if that calling is begging Him to take you home.  She is insane.  But is that not what the Word says ... that the ways of God are not the ways of man?  That the world will never understand the Gospel?  Our Confessions teach so: "The whole world with all diligence has struggled to figure out what God is, what He has in mind and does.  Yet the world has never been able to grasp the knowledge and understanding of any of these things (BOC, LC, II, 63).  

One of my favorite bits is, to me, the most wildest and fantastic bits of all those pages of pure doctrine:  "In order to retain His Gospel among people, He openly sets the confession of saints against the kingdom of the devil and, in our weakness, declares His power" [BOC, AP, V (III), 68].  In our weakness????????????????????

People have told me that I have this great faith.  I don't have any faith, but that which I am given.  Surely my bewailings of my misery on Facebook and the fear and trembling I do in the worst hours of my innards battles proves that.  People have also asked me why I do not hate God, why I am not angry at Him.  As an ex-evangelical, what I was taught of sovereignty and Lordship meant that as His vassal, He is free to do or not do anything in my life and what I face is merely what I deserve.  And being His vassal was my choice.  But as a Lutheran, another sister in Christ helped me to understand the real truth:  He chose me!  And He did not do so in order that I might suffer.  This is not the way God made my body, what He intended for me.  My body has been warped and twisted because of sin in this world, just as all of Creation has been warped and twisted.  God loves me; He is not punishing me for a lack of faith.  I am not fighting these battles so that I can somehow learn to "get right with God." For that battle took place on the cross.  That battle is finished!  I am merely laboring under the ravages of sin, which grieves God so much that He sent His only Son to die for me so that the pangs of death I suffer now are not for all of eternity.

I don't choose this. I would NEVER choose this.  But I do know one thing:  I have learned more of the power of the Living Word, more of the truth of the sweet, sweet Gospel, and more of the work of the Holy Spirit than I ever thought possible ... since dysautonomia began ravaging my innards and the migraines began.

When I first read my beloved Book of Concord, just over three years ago, and the door to the prison that is the egregious perfidy of works righteousness committed against Christ and against Christians in mainline evangelical churches, I have struggled mightily to walk through it.  I have struggled mightily to believe that the Gospel for me--which I knew immediately to be true because it resonated so strongly within me and matches so perfectly with the whole Bible (not just passages here and there)--could be true for one like me.  After all, I knew my weaknesses and learned more of my sin than I thought existed in that first reading of the Large Catechism.  But through the minutes and hours and days and months and now nearly two years of the darkest of moments, when I am too weak to do any sort of clinging, when all I have in me is fear and trembling and tears and a longing to be released from it all that fills my entire being, when I have no words even, the Living Word has clung to me.  Because the Gospel is for me!

A text exchange has, in a way, made that freedom mine to grasp:

Me: I just don't know how to get through the hours of pain and nausea and writhing and waiting until the diarrhea will begin, knowing that after that part is done it is over for a while.  I was pretty desperate a few hours ago.  The desire to die is so strong in the worst parts.  So it ends with relief and fatigue and shame.
Her: No shame for calling on the Lord
Me: Even when that calling is begging Him to take me/kill me?
Her: Especially then

Is not the greatest, most marvelous, most wondrous, truly ineffable gift God gave us the Living Word, that the sweet, sweet Gospel being external, being outside of us, outside of all of our doubts and fears and anxieties and ... shame?

In a few hours, the battle will begin again and I will curl in a ball weeping and wailing and begging, at some point, for an end to this all.  But, when it is over, there will be no shame.

Feel free to remind me of that.  Surely I will forget.