Today will be my sixth surgery in twelve years. This one is for endometriosis. There is no cure for it. I have the choice between troublesome medicines that alter my hormones and make a mess of my brain chemistry or surgeries. I choose surgery every time. I wait and live with pain for as long as possible and then, within two to three years, I ask my doctor for another surgery. 

In a few hours, I will willingly lay myself down on a surgery table, allow the anesthesiologist to put me to sleep, and wake up with four incisions in my belly. That will make it an even twelve scars on my abdomen. The body certainly keeps the score. 

The pool is the right place for me to go the morning before a surgery. At mid-morning the sunlight hits the red flags that hang above the pool, giving them the look of Pentecost rather than plastic. I know that if I time my strokes just right I can come up with the finally-warm-spring sun in my eyes. Today, of all days, I need that sunlight. I need it to move like electricity through my body, filling every part, going straight to my toes. The surgery table is cold; I need the warmth. 

Pools are gentle spaces. They gather a congregation of the marginalized: senior citizens, mothers and babies, newcomers to Canada, the neurodivergent, those with exceptional needs . . . and forty-one-year-olds going for surgery. Only a gentle place can hold all those people. Today, I need to be held. 

Before I start my laps, I look over the lanes. Doug is in lane one. He wears a child-sized orange swim cap with a cat face and rubber ears on it. It is about three sizes too small on his adult head, but it was a gift from his granddaughter, so he wears it in case she asks. 

In the deep end I can see Violet and her son Jason bobbing and splashing. Jason is autistic. Samhar and Anuja are in one of the lanes. They hold hands under the water. Anuja had a stroke two years ago, but in the pool her mobility issues are momentarily forgotten. 

I chose a lane with Aisha. She is eight months pregnant. We pass each other in the water—her swollen body teeming with life and mine full of malfunction. In a few weeks she will go to the hospital for the birth of her baby. Today, a surgeon will remove the death from mine. 

This will be my last forty lengths for a while. You can’t swim after a surgery, and my body will need time to rebuild. I feel hyper-aware of every movement—how my abdominal muscles support my back and arms to pull me forward and how they propel my legs through the water. Today a surgeon will slice through those muscles to remove the endometriosis. 

I haven’t always been this present with my body. Chronic pain has a way of fragmenting reality. Endometriosis has been so painful at times that I abandoned my body and tried to hide in my brain. It was a coping technique that wasn’t sustainable. If not for the beautiful truth of the incarnation, I would still be trying to ignore my body. But I was never able to shake the reality that Jesus lived in his body. I knew that no matter how painful, I had to try and live in mine. After all, I am my body. 

They call what I have an “invisible illness.” I have no outward indication that I am unwell, unless I show you the scars beneath my clothes. It would be helpful if I could roll up my sleeve and reveal a meter that measures my pain or energy that day. But my disease is on the inside, hidden. 

One of the only indicators is pain, which itself is difficult to describe and harder still to quantify. A doctor once asked me to describe the pain. I said it felt like glass breaking inside me with shards shooting out in random directions from a fixed point. The doctor stared at me blankly and said, “That isn’t one of the categories for pain.” I think that’s what makes it so lonely. 

The loneliness is accompanied with a fair amount of guilt. I am plagued with the feeling that I should be more grateful. I should be happy that I can have surgery, that there is a way to lessen the pain. People often say to me, “At least it’s not cancer!” And it’s true, and I am thankful. I just tire of it. Every time I put on that blue gown—the one where I’m never sure if it ties in the front or the back—I feel terrifyingly naked and human. My surgeries are the surest way to check in with reality and remember that I am not in control. 

Illness has a life of its own. It is never convenient. It doesn’t ask your permission or how much or where to grow. It just does. 

This surgery means it is another year that my endometriosis hasn’t been healed. Another year when the pain comes out of nowhere and no medications subdue it. This part of my life creates such dissonance. I find it hard to accept. Growing up, I hoped to get married, have a few kids, and teach high school. Developing a chronic illness in my thirties was not something on that list, let alone developing two. I’m not sure any of us would willingly choose pain. 

In the past few years, I have taken up the spiritual practice of floating. It might not show up in any of the monastic or mystics writings, but if Teresa of Ávila or Julian of Norwich had lived near a YMCA—I think it would have made the list. 

When my laps are done, I slip into the teaching pool. It is warm and quiet. I lay my head back, open my arms and legs wide into a starfish shape, and I float. I focus my mind on the words God spoke to Julian of Norwich: 

Floating is an embodied way that I experience the truth that I am kept. In the pool I practice being held. 

Water quite literally holds things inside it. It exerts perfectly balanced pressure on all sides of an object. It is one of the only places in the world where you stop having to carry your own weight. Water holds us, like babies in a womb and people in the hands of a living God. 

This body I live in—this body that is me, the one filled with endometriosis—is kept by God. Not in a make-believe world without suffering but, instead, the one where my body has lesions that strangle organs and stick my insides together, causing incredible pain. Even here, I am held. Even if I am never healed—in the midst of fear and frailty—I am kept. 

“Kept” is an old word, dating back to the eleventh century. It means “to preserve and keep safe.” But it is also connected to the Latin word observare meaning “to watch and keep an eye on.” Being kept is being safe under the watchful, careful eye of God, who is infinitely gentle and kind, gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in love. I am in good hands. 

I did not always feel like those hands were safe. Initially, I felt abandoned rather than held. This journey with chronic illness has forced me to confront what I truly believe about God. There is nothing quite like pain to make you honest. I would have never admitted it to anyone, but at my core I really did believe that suffering could be avoided. I believed that if you just followed God, in the right way, you could avoid the hardest things. My chronic-illness diagnosis felt like intentional cruelty from God. I was angry and devastated, sinking rather than floating. All I could see ahead of me was a life filled with unending chronic pain. I railed against God, I scoured the internet for solutions and cures, and I tried to figure out how I could bypass pain. 

How could a good God allow this to happen to me? Did God not care about my life, about my young family? Where was he in all of this? Why were other people my age thriving and I was dwindling? Then I found Julian’s writings and heard a different voice speak to the reality of this world’s, my, pain. 

Julian experienced a near-death sickness. As she lay on her deathbed stiff and immoveable, the prayer that rose within her was to have the “mind of the passion.” Julian asks not that her suffering would be removed but that she would be filled with compassion to suffer with Christ. This is hardly the place I was in with my diagnosis. Wasn’t the evidence of a blessed life the absence of suffering? How could she ask for more of it? 

As Julian focuses her mind on the suffering of Christ, Jesus reveals to her that his suffering is a gift to us. His suffering can actually provide comfort to us in our inevitable suffering because he suffered out of love for all of humanity. 

God’s answer to our suffering is his suffering. He is not distant from pain. Instead, our solace is that he who knew no suffering entered into the deepest suffering possible so that we might be understood. And in this understanding no longer be alone. My pain became an opportunity to be like Jesus in his suffering so that I might also know him in his resurrection. 

God’s answer to Julian transformed how I understood the problem of my pain. ​​I came, in time, to accept that the promise of God for my life is not the absence of suffering but the gift of his presence in my suffering. The incarnation is the means of grace through which God can be close to the brokenhearted and save those crushed in spirit. He holds us with pierced hands that bore the pain of the world. These are the tender hands I have come to know in my floating. These are the hands that keep and comfort, for there is nothing more comforting than someone who truly understands what you are experiencing. 

You and I, like the hazelnut, are held, right there, in the pain and agony. God prepares a feast for us in the presence of our enemies, not in their absence. We live in the watchful eye of the one who made us, whose image we bear, who loves us and who has filled our lungs with his ruach—God’s sustaining breath. 

I float in the hands of the one who has come near, the one who understands and can cradle me in the power of redemption and resurrection that his hands also bear the story of. 

So I float, like a tiny hazelnut in a clear turquoise pool, wrapped in the loving hands of a God who is present in pain. A God who bids me remain in this moment and not worry about the future, who speaks to me the truth that every day I am sustained, loved, and held by his everlasting arms. The same ones that made, love, and keep the whole world. 

Whether or not God chooses to heal my body this side of heaven, I will still be here—floating and knowing his love and delight in me. I will be resting, trusting in those hands that always hold. Those hands that keep and care with scars that tell their own story of earthly pain. Hands that hold both the ocean and the missing lamb. 

When Christ comes again I hope he finds me at the pool, floating in this thin place, resting in his hands, small and precious like a hazelnut.