Hearts unfold like flowers before him

It gets dark so early these days. Our kids love to play outside with friends in the afternoon, but I’ve started echoing the call of our parents and our grandparents, “Come home when it gets dark!”, which the weather app on my phone tells me will happen at 5:20 p.m. today. The other day, my husband and kids and I were ships passing in the night, and when I got home, our youngest was playing with a friend in the neighborhood, but my older kids hadn’t seen him within the last hour. I started making dinner and unwittingly tied myself to the stove, watching daylight fade out the window and hoping he would decide to come home soon. Thankfully, right about the time I finished cooking and was about to go out and look for him, he came into the kitchen through the garage, nose like Rudolph’s, running to me in hello and for warmth, and I prayed a silent, “Thank you,” because I have read and watched far too many true crime stories.

For the past year, though, most of life has seemed dark. Not that there haven’t been times of joy; there have, and I have photographic evidence of many of those times. But if I were to sum up the last 12 months, I think the only word I can muster up is hard. Hard in a different way than the years when my husband was in seminary and we had two young kids. Harder than my last two pregnancies, which each felt like they lasted for years, when I had gestational diabetes and spent most of my brain’s energy calculating how many carbs were in every single thing I ate. Harder maybe even than 2020, which is a year that will go down in infamy.

I have tried to remember last December, and I cannot. Right before Thanksgiving something extremely difficult happened that affected me emotionally, spiritually, and relationally. I spent the rest of 2024 in a fog, and was relieved when we entered a new year. I usually enjoy the start of a new year; setting goals, making plans, enjoying the freshness of it. I tried to that this year, but I felt like I was already hamstrung. Not only was I still reeling from what had happened in November and continuing to experience ongoing consequences of that situation, but in October, I had taken a break from running because I thought I had developed plantar fasciitis. By January, though, I had not seen any improvement. I was depressed, heartbroken, and sedentary.¹ In February, I wrote then about how I [thought] I was learning to be dependent, not knowing that I had no idea what I was talking about. My foot was not going to turn out to be the most difficult part of 2025.

Sometime in March, my arms began to act in unusual ways. It started with my forearms. I felt like I was losing strength, and when I pulled something out of the oven, I had to make sure I used both arms regardless of how heavy it was, and even then, I would have the kids move out of the way because I was afraid I would drop the hot pan. I thought it might be carpal tunnel, which seemed odd to develop in both wrists at the same time, but we already had wrist braces, so I began to use those at night.

The arm pain continued, sometimes affecting my hands, sometimes my elbows, and sometimes traveling further into my upper arms. I was still dealing with my stubborn foot and so I just pretended like my arms weren’t hurting. I didn’t even tell anyone about the pain I was having until the end of August. At one point I was regularly sleeping with wrist braces on both arms, an elbow brace on my right elbow, and a splint on my right pointer finger, all in an attempt to reduce the pain.

It was about two weeks after my foot surgery, and the arm pain had gotten so bad that I was struggling to sleep. One night I tossed and turned for hours, unable to find a comfortable position that didn’t cause aching, throbbing pain in one or both arms. I made an appointment at the orthopedist, one who specializes in elbow and arm issues. By this point I had ChatGPT’d my symptoms to death, and didn’t know if it was carpal tunnel, tennis elbow, or some kind of nerve condition. Whatever it was, nothing I had tried helped. I had to limit my paid work, which is entirely done on my laptop, because it was too painful to sit like that and use my arms for long periods of time.

After three months of orthopedist appointments, chiropractor appointments, a nerve study, physical therapy, and an MRI, a spinal surgeon told me the problem is not in my arms at all, but stemming from a variety of issues in my cervical spine. I had already figured out that my neck was the problem, though, because my neck was hurting by then, too.

In her book Chronic Illness: Walking by Faith, Esther Smith writes, “Chronic illness is unpredictable. You never know how you will feel from day to day or from hour to hour. One day you wake up feeling decent, and the next day you feel like you have been hit by a truck. The reason for the sudden change is uncertain. The ups and downs are erratic and exhausting. You work hard to figure out what triggers your symptoms, but if you are like many people, this feels like a fruitless effort. Your body does what it wants, when it wants, just because it wants to.”

This has been the story of 2025. Although my foot surgery was successful, two weeks after the surgery, I took a weird step and sprained the ankle on the foot that had just had surgery. Thankfully, the sprain didn’t affect the surgical site, but it has been more than three months, and my ankle is still not fully recovered from that sprain. It has caused foot pain separate from the pain that led me to surgery. And so, as 2025 draws to a close, I am having to absorb the truth that for this entire year, some part of my body has been hurting every single day. In the worst parts of this fall, my foot, my neck, and both my arms have caused me pain at the same time, and sometimes there has been nothing I can do to ease the pain.

This is not my attempt to elicit forced sympathy. I thought having to use a scooter for a few weeks in February was God’s method of teaching me dependence. And it did, because as Esther Smith also says, “Physical limitation can become a spiritual asset that leads to dependence on God.” But it did not fix my need to be in control, or my belief that what I do is what determines who I am. The night I lay in bed begging God to please let my arms stop hurting so that I could go to sleep, I also felt like the Lord was trying to tell me something. What it was, I couldn’t be exactly sure, but it was just a sense that the Lord was trying to get my attention.

He did not let my arms stop hurting that night, or the next night, or many of the nights since then. And now my neck has decided to join the party.²

There was a week before Thanksgiving when I had almost no pain, and I didn’t want to get my hopes up. That was good, because the following week, on Thanksgiving Day, I found myself almost immobile due to the pain in my neck radiating down my right arm.

While the MRI showed why my arms have been hurting, and I have recently found ways to manage the pain and have hope that there will be even greater relief, it didn’t really show me why, if you know what I mean.

No diagnostic scan could explain why the Lord, after having me walk through deep emotional pain a year ago, pain that has left a bruise on my soul, would have me walk through what has at times felt like overwhelming physical pain. He has not explained himself. And it is not because I haven’t asked. Every night as I fall asleep, trying to find a comfortable position, and every morning when I wake up, tentatively moving my body to see if there has been any relief in sleep, I ask him to please make it stop.

It has not stopped to the extent that I wish it would.

And so it is not surprising to me that dark and hard are the most descriptive words I can come up with to describe this year. I don’t have the energy to think of anything else. But it has also meant that Advent has collided with my heart in a way it hasn’t in many years.

Joyful, joyful, we adore thee,
God of glory, Lord of love;
Hearts unfold like flow’rs before thee,
Op’ning to the sun above.

My heart has been looking for a reason to have hope, for light to somehow seep in through the many cracks in my soul. And without any rational explanation, that is what has happened.

Melt the clouds of sin and sadness;
Drive the dark of doubt away;
Giver of immortal gladness,
Fill us with the light of day!

My hard heart has begun to thaw, in response to what is nothing other than the sense of the Lord’s nearness. My arms still hurt sometimes and my neck still hurts sometimes, although a recent injection in my spine has helped tremendously. Some days, my foot still hurts. I continue to do a barrage of physical therapy exercises almost every day, in hopes that I can strengthen the surrounding muscles enough to ease the pain.

The light of God’s love has been shining. Through my 15-year-old who always asks me what he can do to help. Through my 8-year-old cuddling up next to me on the couch after I had to sit down after making dinner, my neck pain causing real tears. “I’m so sorry your neck hurts,” she said.

While I did keep my arm pain to myself for months, I have not been able to keep it from those close to me. They see and feel my weakness along with me, and I have had to ask them for daily help for things that seem silly and trivial (carrying things upstairs. opening jars. chopping food.).

Sometimes there will be a moment when nothing hurts, and I start to get excited and think about things I can do with fewer restrictions, and then the pain returns, and I feel it like a brick in the bottom of my stomach, and my soul starts to jump off the edge into a dark pit, and then, then, then, there is light.

I am not alone in my pain. There is another, my older brother, Jesus, who has felt the weakness inherent in the human body. He experienced untold restriction and limitations for our sake, and he sees me.

Why has the Lord not removed this pain, after all the therapy and appointments and time and tears I have put into trying to make the pain stop? I don’t know. The hopelessness is not very far away, but for now, the darkness of despair has been interrupted.

I have never felt less victorious, and yet my heart keeps turning toward the sun of the love of Jesus, and it has brought a warmth and comfort that I was unknowingly desperate for.

Just when it appears as though the wintertime of the soul is about to come in all of its crushing sadness, God’s light shines. And it is a dazzling light, because he is the God of immeasurable mercy and grace. He enters into the darkness and emptiness of our experiences to bring his light, his joy, and his peace.—Alistair Begg, Let Earth Receive Her King

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I have been so greatly blessed this Advent by listening to Andrew Osenga’s new album Christmas Hymns on repeat, over and over again. All of the songs are on YouTube and the album is on Spotify, but here is the one I’ve been fixated on this week.

1. I wrote about what ended up happening with my foot in this post.

2. If you are upset at having not received an invitation to this party, don’t be sad. It’s the worst party ever.