... and all will be well

Each month on Salvos Online, Rosy, the Territorial Secretary for Spiritual Life Development, shares her thoughts and reflections on the spiritual issues that shape our lives as Christians, exploring how our faith intersects with our everyday experiences and how we can deepen our relationship with God. Today, she goes deep into her battle with a recent diagnosis and how she copes with it on a daily basis

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Sometimes I find it hard to pray.

As a minister and Christian, I realise that not many might feel comfortable admitting this, but I also believe it’s something many of my sisters and brothers in Christ experience at times. There is so much chaos I don’t understand in the world, in our health, our lives, our churches and our relationships.

For me, I am wrestling with my diagnosis of endometriosis. Although symptoms began wrecking my life at age 12, I only received a formal diagnosis and surgery last year, at 36.

I’m continuing to educate myself about this condition. Mine is stage four and affects most of my organs. Endometriosis is a whole-of-body disorder that has no cure. Medical experts are beginning to recognise that it replicates similarly to cancer. For centuries, endometriosis has been negligently understudied, and it has often only been diagnosed or treated (if at all) in relation to childbearing rather than the impact on women’s quality of life.

I shared a little of this wrestle recently at a creative holiness exploration night called Set Apart at South Barwon Corps, started by a young friend of mine. 

As we learned about holiness together and experimented with different creative elements of worship and oneness, I felt such a deep connection to the other believers in the room. It makes the contrast of spending the majority of the following days bedridden even more stark.

How do sickness, illness and feelings of uselessness ‘throw us back upon God?’, as Samuel Logan Brengle, our foremost holiness theologian, asks.

“Why you? Why not someone else?” Such questions are natural … but are they wise?’ he writes, recounting many illnesses that wracked his body over his lifetime (found in Brengle for Today)

A friend asked me what had lit up in my pocket while I was facilitating the spoken word part of the Set Apart night. It was my TENS machine – an electronic pain-disrupting device I wear nearly every day. I am on a variety of lifelong medications. I continue to believe God can heal me if it’s his will, and that God is faithful whether or not he does.

But that doesn’t make the reality any easier.

I found myself crying today while writing this, listening to a song with the words “all will be well.” When I looked up the song, I instead came across another I had never heard before: All Will Be Well by Meg Barnhouse.

Meg wrote the lyrics as a conversation between someone anxious about the state of the world and an imagined exchange with Julian of Norwich, a 15th-century mystic and the first woman whose words were ever recorded in English.

The revelation in the lyrics goes like this:

I said, “Julian, you are holy, you are holding my hand.”

She said, “All will be well, and all will be well,

All manner of things will be well.”

I said, “Julian, do you not know, do you not know about sorrow?”

(pain, hunger, shame)

She said, “All will be well, and all will be well,

All manner of things will be well.”

I said, “Julian, do you not know, do you not know about loneliness?”

(disease, cruelty)

I said, “Julian, it’s too much; it brought me to my knees.”

She said, “All will be well …”

She said, “No one does not know, does not know about sorrow …”

(pain, hunger, shame)

She said, “All will be well …”

She said, “No one does not know, does not know about loneliness …”

(disease, cruelty)

She said, “I know, it’s too much. It brought me to my knees, where I heard: ‘All will be well…’”

I said, “Julian, you are holy, you are holding my hand.”

And she said, “All will be well …”

She said, “Dear one, do you not know, do you not know about tenderness?

(friends, the Spirit)

Dear one, do you not know, it’s only love that never ends?

And so all will be well …”

This got me thinking about the word ‘well’. The well-known story of the ‘woman at the well’ comes to mind:

“Jacob’s well was there, and Jesus, tired as he was from the journey, sat down by the well. It was about noon. When a Samaritan woman came to draw water, Jesus said to her, ‘Will you give me a drink?’” (John 4:6-7 NIV).

A Samaritan woman with no name (but who had a name with scare quotes attached!), cast aside by her ex-husbands, for only men could issue the certificate of divorce – she came to the well, unwell.

Jesus saw her. He saw her need and her will. He engaged her in the longest theological conversation recorded in the Bible. He convinced her of who he was, revealing himself to her in a way he hadn’t with his disciples.

This scene is reminiscent of God’s encounter with Hagar in the desert centuries earlier. Another woman, another well, unwell and alone, pregnant and on foot in the scorching desert, convinced she would die. But God met her at the well, and it was there she gave God a name.

“She gave this name to the Lord who spoke to her: ‘You are the God who sees me,’ for she said, ‘I have now seen the One who sees me.’ That is why the well was called Beer Lahai Roi; it is still there, between Kadesh and Bered” (Genesis 16:13-14 NIV).

Beer Lahai Roi means “well of the living One who sees me”.

“Then, leaving her [vessel], the woman went back to the town and said to the people” (John 4:28 NIV).

One day, we shall all leave our vessels behind. I spend the majority of my life unwell – but it shall be well.

Holiness isn’t just a drawing aside alone. Julian of Norwich spent her life cloistered away from the world, yet her words continue to ring out loud as gospel proclamation. As we came aside at Set Apart, we experienced holiness in the ordinary.

Holiness is perhaps the offering of our painful, fragile, and inelegant places as vessels to be filled with God’s grace and glory, even if we deem them unworthy, too small, or unwell.

Holiness is our whole selves, for the whole world redeeming, and the whole Gospel enjoining in us.

“Surely God is my salvation; I will trust and not be afraid.

The Lord, the Lord himself, is my strength and my defense;

he has become my salvation song.

With joy you will draw water from the wells of salvation” (Isaiah 12:2–3 NIV).

Maybe being a life-filled follower of Christ means all will be well at the well of the living One who sees me. Even though sometimes it’s hard to pray, I still do. Maybe you can pray with me?

Lord, 

Your will be done in my life. Let me know your love and peace, in the midst of my circumstances. Let me know you, and that all will be well, and you see us. Let me love and see others, and bring wellness to the world because I know tenderness, peace and the Spirit through you.

“And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain, for the former things are passed away” (Revelation 21:4 KJV).

One day I’ll be well

And it will be well

And all will be well

With me.