She keeps expecting that if God gave her this disease, He’ll also give her the grace to handle it, and He doesn’t. She’s angry and feels cheated, while still trying to find a way to make it better and to live her day-to-day life.
She is wrong. That reviewer is wrong. I didn’t get angry at God. I didn’t.
The quote is from a blog that recently gave a review of my book. Reading reviews of my book is like getting an exclusive peek at the rook card I’m holding up to my forehead. A glimpse of how someone else is viewing me. And sometimes I want to run to them, screaming, “No! That’s not me!”
I never got angry. The tears weren’t tears of anger, they were tears of frustration and confusion and hopelessness.
Everyone is trying to understand pain, and how people react to pain. When hard times came, what should have happened?
- I should have gotten an extra dose of God’s grace
- I should have gotten angry at God
- I should have gotten closer to God
- I should have…….
I don’t know what should have happened, but I didn’t get angry at God, and as far as I can tell I didn’t get any magic grace, or get any closer to God than I would have, had I not gotten sick. That last point is a little hard to figure out. But honestly, I don’t think my sickness changed my relationship with God all that much. I was very very close to Him before I got sick. I was very very close to Him during my sickness. I was very very close to him after the sickness was over. There was always growth in the relationship, but it was a steady thing. The sickness didn’t seem to affect it one way or another.
Why didn’t it?
Should it have?
Everyone seems to think that it should have. Because if hard times don’t change your view of God, then what is the point of hard times?
Honestly, I don’t know. But sometimes, if I dig and dig, trying to find the point, I feel like I miss the point, somehow.
Once I wrote, “sometimes I forget what it’s like to not be sick.”
Well now I forget what it’s like to never have had west nile.
Everything I have done this past year is a result. Redmond and Colorado and Annie and even SMBI. You want to know how it happened that I ended up at SMBI? Really?
Before I got sick I never even considered SMBI. I was going to EBI. But then I went to a sleepover and everyone laughed and laughed. I got out my notebook and wrote, “If you see somebody laughing, that’s not me. Cause nothing is the way it used to be.”
The way I saw it, EBI was a laughing school. SMBI was a sit down and study school. So I began to consider SMBI.
Now I know this is ironic considering the number of times I’ve accidentally laughed out loud in the library this term. So I never really stopped laughing, I just began laughing for different reasons.
I know I’ve changed. Me, Emily Smucker. I’ve changed deep inside. I look at life differently. It sounds like a good thing, but it isn’t always. Sometimes it is.
But what would I be if west nile had never touched me? That’s the part I can’t see anymore. I could at the beginning. I saw everything my life would be were it not for west nile, and I wanted it very badly. But the more west nile wrapped it’s tentacles around my life, the more it just became my life, and I couldn’t exactly tell what would have happened otherwise.
When it comes to pain, everyone has a theory. Some theories make sense to me, some don’t. If you have a good theory on why pain happens, feel free to comment.
But I don’t have a theory yet. I can’t figure it out. I can see good that has come out of my sickness, and I can see bad that has come out of it. I can’t see what would have happened had it never happened.
Sometimes it feels like I’m digging and digging to find the point, and because of that, I’m missing the point.
The Girl in the Red Rubber Boots 
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