How I Learned to Love Handicapped Parking Spaces

I wouldn’t say much, if anything. Intellectually, I understood the purpose of handicapped parking spaces. And while I would do an internal grimace whenever I was looking for a parking space and find the only empty spaces to be those marked handicapped, I knew that if they weren’t marked, they would have been long filled.

Intellectually, I understood it. I’d even bite my tongue when I’d see people with a handicapped parking sticker or tag on their cars rather cheerfully exit their automobiles and almost skip to wherever it was they were going. Handicapped, right.

Then came the ruptured disk in my back.

After working at home for three weeks (the most comfortable position was flat on my back on the floor), I finally had enough pain medication to consider returning to work.

What I forgot was that the building with my office was a good long block from the employee parking lot. And it was uphill, requiring maneuvering through several sets of stairs. With my cane and my computer bag. And having to use an umbrella when it’s raining.

This lasted all of about three days.

I talked to the doctor and got the form for a handicapped parking space. I went to a state revenue office and paid the small fee. It was good for 90 days. I would later renew it once, for an additional 90 days.

Instead of walking a long block uphill, I was able to park right outside my office building. Flat terrain. No stairs. It was still a hassle when it rained (and later snowed), having two hands when I needed three for the cane, computer bag and umbrella, but it was a much shorter hassle.

In The Fire of Delayed Answers, Bob Sorge says that one of the first things that happened after he experienced a physical affliction was “new-found compassion for the handicapped and the infirm. My pain sensitized me to the pain of the world.”

I can’t say my pain, and the affliction of a ruptured disk, sensitized me to the pain of the world, but it did make me extraordinarily thankful for handicapped parking spaces. It helped me understand why there were needed in the first place. It stopped my internal complaining. And it made me more conscious of people with physical handicaps who have to struggle to do the things we take for granted.

Like walking to your office from the parking lot.

Led by Jason Stasyszen and Sarah Salter, we’ve been reading The Fire of Delayed Answers. To see more posts on this chapter, “Comfort for the Afflicted,” please visit Sarah at Living Between the Lines.

Photograph by Tonny Watanebe via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

God Does What?

You’re reading along in a book, part of a book discussion, nodding and agreeing, and then you hit a chapter that takes you off the rails. And you’re trying to figure out how to get back on the rails.

Led by Jason Stasyszen and Sarah Salter, we’ve been reading The Fire of Delayed Answers by Bob Sorge. It’s a good book, filled with the kind of insight that comes from personal experience and theological understanding. I’ve found myself smoothly moving with the narrative flow.

And then I had my train wreck: Chapter 7 – “Comfort for the Afflicted.” Right up front, Sorge lays out his thesis: Affliction and infirmity are useful tools in God’s hands to refine His servants.

Sorge is speaking from a place of physical infirmity, He doesn’t say what it is, but it has been severe enough to lead him into a spiritual wilderness. He’s been suffering this infirmity through the writing of two books, this one and a previous one, some four years after suffering an injury.

Two-and-a-half years ago, the Saturday before Father’s Day, I was working in the garden, digging a hole for a small plant, and I stood up. A pain shot through my body like I had never felt, and I grabbed the side of the house to steady myself and keep from falling. The pain was severe enough to have knocked me down.

Somehow, I maneuvered myself inside. The pain was lessening; ibuprofen was at hand. Things gradually returned to a semblance of normal. A few weeks later, the pain came back, big time. I had suffered a ruptured disk in my back. The pain extended from the middle of my back, down my left leg and to the toes of my foot. I could not function with strong pain medications, the one that’s a step below morphine. I had to take the maximum dose, and I can remember watching the clock as it ticked slowly toward the next allowable dose.

The pain medicine was so strong that I couldn’t drive a car. The pain was so strong that the only comfortable position was flat on my back on the floor. A third person came to live in our house for the next six months, and his name was Mr. Pain. He was my constant companion, and my wife will tell you he changed my personality (and not for the better).

What lay ahead was months of intense physical therapy and traction twice a week. For a time I was walking with a cane, my body tilted at a 30-degree angle. I parked in handicapped parking spots. I learned how to walk in the rain (and snow) with a cane, carrying my briefcase and holding an umbrella. Surgery was a distinct possibility, and I had heard all the stories about how back surgery never works. A business associate I met stared at my cane and said, “You know, you’re never going to get better.”

I’ll cover some of what I learned from this experience next week, but Bob Sorge forced me to consider something I had not previously considered. This pain, this horrible pain I experienced, may likely have come from God.

That thought took me right off the rails.

We’ve been reading The Fire of Delayed Answers. To see more posts on this week’s chapter, “Comfort for the Afflicted,” please visit Jason at Connecting to Impact.

Photograph by George Hodan via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

Ministers and Fire

Who experiences the refining fire of affliction?

Ministers, says Bob Sorge in The Fire of Delayed Answers. Ministers. And he defines a minister as “someone who waits on, who serves, who ministers, who attends.”

In the church, that definition covers a broad swatch of people. Like all of us.

Some years back, at a time when a lot of companies were laying people off in St. Louis, I was at church one Sunday, talking with a friend who worked at the same large organization I did. He noted one of our fellow church members, a man who had held a very senior executive position when he had been laid off some time before.

“You have to wonder,” my friend said. “He’s been out of work for a year. What could be the problem?”

I don’t recall my response exactly, but it was something like “the market is hard right now, especially if you want to stay in St. Louis.”

Some months after this conversation, the friend who had made the observation lost his job. He had just been told of his downsizing, and he called me, devastated. I told him to meet me in the cafeteria for lunch.

When we met, his first question was, “You’re willing to be seen with me?” What had happened was that the departmental colleagues did what was a normal thing back then – they stopped talking with him. He had become a non-person. It was as devastating as the layoff itself.

It would be more than two years before my friend found employment. Too many people with his skills and background were looking for work.  His search for work would take him all over the United States.

And this was man who had been highly regarded, and officially classified as a “high potential” employee.

He went through the fire. One of the people who counseled and helped him was that laid-off executive he had talked about.

Six years later, I was laid off by my then-employer. The circumstances were different; a boss who was in a position far beyond the individual’s capabilities was threatened by anyone who knew what they were doing. The boss, interestingly enough, was laid off at the same time I was. I ultimately benefitted from the layoff; the boss did not.

It’s difficult to understand a refining fire when you’re the one being refined.  Some days, it’s all you can do to hang on to your faith.

But each of us faces that refining. Some of us have to hold on longer than others, often for no discernible reason. The refining can become a flame, and a light.

“We become the light of the world,” writes Sorge, “when our passion for Jesus burns as a flame before others.”

And the refining fire comes to the ministers.

Led by Jason Stayszsen and Sarah Salter, we’re reading The Fire of Delayed Answers. To see others’ comments, please visit Jason at Connecting to Impact and Sarah at Living Between the Lines. This week’s discussion concludes chapter 1, “Refiner’s Fire.”

Photograph by David Wagner via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

The Refining Fire of Affliction

It was what we still call our horrible year, the year when virtually everything that could go wrong went wrong.

1987.

It’s still hard to talk about it.

On a Saturday in early March, I had gone out on an errand, likely the local hardware store. It was a lengthy errand; I was home in with an hour. When I arrived, I found our next door neighbor  sitting with my crying wife. The call had come from New Orleans – my father had had a stroke. I was able to get a flight that evening, but the plane was late leaving, the connection was missed in Memphis, the airline got me to Baton Rouge and arranged for a taxi to take me to New Orleans (airlines did things like that back then).

Within 24 hours, the family had told the doctors to remove from father from the machines keeping him alive. He left behind him a business that was a mess, and I was the executor of the estate. I stayed there a week, returned home, and then we drove down two weeks later. Mess had to be taken care of for months.

In June, the church we were attending erupted, largely because of an ill-designed building program. I was an elder, and had raised questions about what was planned, making a lot of people angry (things aren’t easy when you’re on the losing end of a 14 to 2 vote). I ended up resigning from the elder board. While it caused an uproar and harmed several relationships, the uproar did eventually result in structural problems coming to light, problems that would have likely bankrupted the church had the building program gone forward.

Then in October, work blew up, politics of the kind that was so naked and obvious that the entire organization I was working in was upended. I had been working almost feverishly for four years, only to see the wrong person get an unexpected promotion a few months into the job. I left the division, even after being offered “anything I wanted,” including a promotion, to stay. But the situation was broken, and it was time to leave.

Father, church, career. My world had turned upside down in six months. And my wife was pregnant with your youngest, who was born that December.

It’s easy to write and talk about the refining fire of affliction. It is another thing altogether to love it. Christians know there is always a point; we also know that it may be years before we understand what the point was.

In The Fire of Delayed Answers, Bob Sorge says this in answer to the question, why does God allow affliction? “In His mercy, He allows other fires to put the heat on our lives: financial stress, physical distress,…family distress. Without the heat, so often our love grows cold.”

That sound likes a one-sided answer, one that would likely not offer much comfort to someone suffering a serious affliction, at least while they were experiencing it.

But, in retrospect, that’s what happened with us in 1987 (and some years before and after that, too). We came out of that year changed, but during that year it often seemed that all we could do was hold on. Just hold on.

I think that was the point, too. Just to hold on, hold on to our faith.

And today I can talk with people who lose loved ones, experience job upheaval, and see their churches blow up, and can empathize in a way someone who hasn’t experienced those things simply can’t.

Led by Jason Stayszsen and Sarah Salter, we’ve started reading The Fire of Delayed Answers. To see others’ comments, please visit Jason at Connecting to Impact and Sarah at Living Between the Lines.

Photograph by Junior Libby via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.