Arrival: Life In The Negative Space

I cried in the car today. 

If you read my last post you know some of the symptoms I was experiencing as a result of my new panacea medicine. 

This got worse this morning, my scar hurt like it did when I was in recovery. I had aches all over my body and the chills. I could barely lift my head from my pillow from within the prison of my bed-ridden existence.

The reason I cried is because of the negative space, the unknown.

My psychiatrist wrote off my side-effects as not being caused by this medicine. (he also wouldn't let me get a picc line and I have horrible veins but my mom was driving me so I didn't want to cry).

But today, after more blood draws at my primary care, the doctor said he thinks that it's all due to the new medicines I'm on and he's also sending out my lithium levels so we'll see there.

Negative space: in art, the part that isn't the actual picture but sort gives the positive space room to land on. Great artists are just as meticulous about the space they use and the space they don't use because negative space can tell the observer just as ,much as positive space.

Have you ever seen or read Arrival? if you haven't stop reading here and go watch it. Towards the end, when things are getting down to the wire, the differing creatures (I refuse to call them aliens because cultural relativism, people!). So the differing creatures sent one last encrypted, highly intelligent message. The linguist and the physicist couldn't figure out the cypher. Then, with gallantry, the physicist figures out that the message was hidden in the negative space of the 3-D message: time, it was about time. but that's beside the point. Here's the real point: you can communicate life-saving messages through negative space.

So when I feel I like death is winning the fight because, at least in this case, no one can tell me what's wrong and no survivor of a rare cancer wants to hear that, I remember the negative space.

God doesn't always respond right away or at all the way you want him to, but he always answers. Often times in the negative spaces of your life, your community.

As I turned-on the ignition my care in front of patient first and started crying. And soon I felt another person in the car. He was crying too. It was Jesus. 

In between the positive spaces of two highly trained doctors into whom I have vested all my hope, two doctors who couldn't tell me exactly what's wrong or if the cancer's back, in the negative space, I encountered the God Who Sees Me (shout out, Hagar!).

Knowing that you have a God the suffered for you 2 millennia before you were born and makes petitions for us in heaven, and, yes, suffers with us now, doesn't take the pain away or mitigate the reality of a fractured existence on this long sojourn home. But it makes us look back at the pristine Garden and forward to the Heavenly Jerusalem. And I think what he wants us to know is that he is just so very with us. In the positive, useful stages, and in the negative, useful spaces. Emmanuel, God with us, our very present help.

Don't miss him in the fallow seasons of your life. He may not visit us with the angel of the lord like Hagar in her negative spaces (literal deserts), but he will be there. 

I can hear the words of Lily Potter, saying to her bereaved son, "we never left."

God's not afraid of my (and your) circumstances or everybody's seeming ignorance as to what's wrong with me, be assured: he's never left.