Jesus Street
by Jessica Gerbrant Frey
I’ve lived for the past six years with chronic, phantom, pain caused by scar tissue that developed after radiation treatment for a brain tumor. Today, exactly half of my body is affected by aching, burning, stinging, or stabbing pain. It’s a white-hot searing sheet of pain that splits my bones.
My boys regularly beg Jesus for my comfort. “Are you in pain Mao?” they ask (they call me Mao – “cat” in Chinese). “Dear Jesus, please take Mao’s pain away forever”. They pray and pray with longing and persistence. But, despite their pleas they haven’t seen an answer, my pain persists. And I worry. I worry that their unanswered prayers for healing will lead them to believe that God doesn’t care or listen. How desperately I want them to believe that God is good and loving. I fear my unresolved pain may become the origin of a real gripe they take out against God.
Romans 8:28 says, “God works everything for the good of those who love him and who are called according to his purposes”. If I were someone else looking in at my family, I could easily see how God is using my disability to benefit my sons. I’d see that this experience is nurturing them to be caring, sensitive, and intuitive boys who will someday be men able to look deeply and compassionately at the challenges in others’ lives. But for me, in this moment, everything seems crazily bent out of shape. The future seems doomed to bring only more pain, physically and spiritually, to me and my family.
And yet, thinking about me, I can see God simultaneously shifting my perspective from doom to eternity.
My life, in the space of eternity, barely represents a dot. God sees “me” – not in this moment – but “me” across and outside of time. God sees me in an eternal way where he is somehow eternally creating and recreating me. Sometimes I can grasp how time ceases to be a factor with God because I have some memories that are so vivid that it feels as if I’m actually able to relive them. It’s as if the fact that I’m almost 34 doesn’t matter – time doesn’t exist when I remember being 5, 10, 15, 20, 25, and 30 so vividly.
Here’s an example. When I was 12, I loved going for long walks by myself. There was a new street on the edge of town and I loved walking it, talking to God and praising him as the sun sunk below the horizon, shooting colors across the horizon. Sometimes I would hunker down in the long grass, soaking in the joy, peace, and beauty that was all around me. I decided to name it Jesus Street, because I loved the communion I felt with the Lord there.
When I think back to Jesus Street, I can still smell the smells, feel the feels, hear the sounds. I can still enter communion with God just by recalling the memory. And when I do this….am I not tasting eternity there? What has really changed? I am I. God is God. We still commune. I still feel the Jesus Street joy as a real and alive emotion. Even though I feel messed up in this moment at age 34, I feel the peace and joy of former times, alive now today.
When we first moved back from China, we lived in a little one room cabin where the four of us all slept, lived and cooked for eight months while we gutted and renovated an old farmhouse. James, my husband, worked while the boys and I stayed home. We would do schoolwork and clean up the yard. It’s a gorgeous farm and there is evidence all around that its founders cared about beauty. We have a giant slough that looks like a little lake on one side and giant pond on the other.
But the isolation and abandoned feel of the land creeped me out when we first arrived. Coyotes, bears, skunks, badgers, snakes, moose, deer and vegetation had been busily reclaiming this land for wild before we moved in. What was I doing there?
Every morning when James would drive off to work, I would leave the cabin to see him off. As I watched the car retreat, I would feel overwhelmed by the vastness of this “human-less“ space that surrounded me. It was so beautiful, but so empty. It felt like me. I would walk by the slough soaking in the scent of the grass and the water. I’d feel a rush of beauty as the sun rose and as the wild ducks and chorus of birds sang their praises to God. I felt my “nothingness” in that place, and yet I returned every morning to have my nothing filled again. The peace in this nothingness are echoes of moments on Jesus Street, but also of some future when I’m 80 years old, still myself experiencing the Nothing and the Everything of me and of God. I’m not messed up in those places.
Recently, a song from when I was a teenager and attending Youth Group (another contact with eternity) came to mind. The words are:
I cry a silent prayer
That comes out of me
It’s a mystery
Come wash over me
Wash over me
‘Til I can’t take any more
And I dream that my voice is heard
In a secret place
Where I bare my face
Come wash over me
Wash over me
‘Til I can’t take any more
I’m realizing the mystery of standing before God, not as a 34 year who feels bound by pain and doesn’t know how to deal with it, but as an entire timeline of Jessica rolled up into one dot in eternity. The 12-year-old on Jesus Street, the Youth, the Missionary, the 34-year-old, the 80-year-old. All those times and those moments touch the common denominators: Me, God, Nothing, and Everything. It’s me, being saved from myself by a God who does not desire to crush me.
It’s me and God in Eternity, right now and forever. It’s Corinthians 4:17-18:
“For this light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison, as we look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen. For the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal.”
