I Am Renewed

I will refresh the weary and satisfy the faint.

—Jeremiah 31:25

Recently I found out a dear friend is on hospice. Her years of fighting breast cancer to no avail, she now faces the imminent end of her life.

My heart hurts.

Over the years of our friendship, I’ve watched her face her foe with joy and unwavering belief in her God. Her spirit—even in her real moments of struggle—gave me courage when I faced my own life-and-death battle. It gives me strength still.

And yet tonight my heart feels only grief. No strength. No confidence. No courage, spiritual or otherwise. Only a sadness that seeps into my bones and a weariness that will not be relieved. I know a bit of her suffering. I know the kind of physical pain that makes you wish for death. I understand the exhaustion of soul that can’t stand the thought of another five minutes of life.

Today she endures that—and so much more.

So tonight I think about her, hovering on the edge of death. And to tell you the truth, it exhausts me. I’m tired of this broken and fragile life. I’m tired of the suffering that seems determined to torture us. I’m tired of the lack of relief, the absence of answers. Today, as seems to happen more often than not, I feel like a desperate King David, weeping tears that refuse to comfort:

It’s not that I don’t believe in God. I do—with all my heart. But this human spirit is not indomitable. Like a towel washed too many times, I feel I’ve grown too thin.

In an attempt to pull myself from my despair, I opened my computer to check email. Waiting for me, like a hand-delivered gift, was a message from Chris, an online friend who lives in Germany. He too knows a thing or two about physical suffering. Having endured multiple life-threatening illnesses requiring brutal and constant treatment, he experiences long stretches of days during which he cannot pull his twenty-nine-year-old self out of bed. Not easy for a man accustomed to a high-paced corporate job, running marathons, and enjoying an adventurous life. Without knowing my sadness, he’d sent me the following words: “To inspire (used nonreflexively), from the Latin inspirare, has of course the stem spir in it. It is, very literally, to give or put spirit into someone. To inspire someone is way more than making them happy or amazed or even making them feel good. It is to lend them spirit when they are short. And of course because of the incorporeal nature of both air and spirit, the act of inhaling also became known as inspiration. In that sense too: it is like mechanical ventilation for a soul that’s lost its resolve for a moment.”

After that, he told me that my hard journey inspires his own, even when I don’t realize it. What he didn’t know, couldn’t know, is that with a few words dashed off in an email, Chris offered mechanical ventilation in a moment when I could no longer inhale any hope for myself.

More than that, however, my friend’s words reminded me of another gift of inspiration:

In a world that flings around the word inspiration without a thought, we’ve been offered the only real gift of inspiration mankind could ever hope for: the Holy Spirit. The presence of God exhaling hope into us.

God has breathed into you and me the breath of life, so that when hard moments come and we no longer have the strength to inhale on our own, we can trust He’ll renew our weary souls.

Inhale. Exhale. Grief may last for a night, but joy comes in the morning.

Can you feel the freedom that rises up in you when you have been stripped naked and have nothing to inhibit your movement anymore? . . . Jesus enters into our sadness, takes us by the hand, pulls us grently up to where we can stand and invites us to dance.

—HENRI J.M. NOUWEN, SPIRITUAL FORMATION