Lessons Of An Intruder

Lessons of an Intruder

A third time he asked him, “Simon son of John, do you love me?” Peter was hurt that Jesus asked the question a third time. He said, “Lord, you know everything. You know that I love you.” Jesus said, “Then feed my sheep.”

John 21:17

Dick Peterson called it “the intruder.” And it was a fitting name for the multiple sclerosis that was invading his wife’s body, as well as their marriage. He knew that his marriage to Elizabeth was about to be stretched to the max. What he didn’t know was how many life-changing lessons he would learn along the way—lessons about practicing Christ’s love.

“Her disease became my disease,” he writes. “As she moved from cane to walker to electric scooter and finally to a powered wheelchair, then lost use of her right hand, I had to adjust my life to fit her needs. . . . We do have the choice to let it tear us apart or use it to strengthen our marriage bond as we face the adversity together. . . . It reaches to feelings, emotions, and attitudes about what we do, what’s done to us, and who we are to ourselves and each other.”^a

Do they pray for healing? Of course. They agonize before God for Elizabeth’s health to return. Their hearts long for the days when she could offer a tender touch with her fingers instead of a permanently clenched fist. “But if we only grieve the loss,” he says, “we miss the gain—that what this disease does to us may also be done for us. Even as the MS steals abilities from Elizabeth’s life, a healing grows almost undetected inside. When we talk about this, Elizabeth wonders aloud, ‘Did it really take this to teach me that my soul is more important to God than my body?’”

At the same time, Dick is asking,

Is this what Jesus meant when he taught his disciples to serve? When he washed their feet, did he look 2,000 years into the future and see me washing my wife’s clothes and helping her onto her shower seat to bathe? Did it really take this to teach me compassion? God’s healing can be sneaky. We pray that Elizabeth will resume her old life; he wants her to assume a new life. We long for change on the outside; he desires change on the inside. We pray for what we want; he answers with what he knows we need. [God] has made me question whom it is I love. When I pray for healing, is it for Elizabeth? Or is it because her healing would make life so much easier for me? I challenge, “Aren’t you the God who heals? I love her and I want her well. ” But in the back of my mind I know I also want her healed for me.

In response to this challenge, Jesus asks Dick as he asked Peter, “Do you love me more than these?” Dick’s response: “I think He wants me to love him more than my wife. So I reply with Peter’s words, ‘Yes, Lord. You know that I love you.’”

Lord, grant that I might not so much seek . . . to be loved as to love.

—St. Francis of Assisi

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