A wonderful thing happened to me: I was diagnosed with bronchitis. Only bronchitis, just like I get every year. Praise God! It was wonderful because I realized, like I do every year, that I hadn’t suddenly become lazy and useless, but was legitimately quite sick, just like every year. And, like every other year, I would probably feel better soon.
It was Facebook that helped me see the pattern. The “memories” feature shows you what you said you were doing on this day last year, and the year before, and the year before that, as long as you’ve been on Facebook. It turns out to be a very useful diagnostic and psychological tool, a kind of automated journaling.
Through Facebook memories showing me recurring patterns in my life, I have discovered other things about myself: That I always make insanely ambitious plans when the weather starts to get warmer; I always think I’m a washed-up loser by the end of the summer; I always get in a panic about my kids’ religious education at a certain point during the year; I’m always tired of my same old pork recipes at a certain point. And I always move past it, one way or the other.
I always, in other words, move through cycles, peaks and valleys, highs and lows; and life always goes on. Having this perspective can be immensely reassuring. It’s one thing to think, “I’m drowning!” and quite another to think, “I feel like I’m drowning, but I always feel this way at this time, and I always make it through.”
A dull and fruitless season
I’m writing this essay now because it’s very common to feel awful in January and February. The sparkle and bustle of Christmas are over, but there are so many short, dark days to come before winter lets up. School is no fun, work is no good, and everything there is to look forward to is far, far away. Even the things we normally enjoy and feel passionate about seem dull and fruitless in this dull and fruitless season of the calendar. ESPECIALLY IF YOU HAVE UNDIAGNOSED BRONCHITIS.
Would it help to know it probably always feels this way, every year, to one degree or another? Would it help to know that there is not a single human endeavor, no matter how objectively valuable, that feels worthwhile all the time?
Some of the peaks and valleys of human existence follow an annual pattern, aligning with the weather or the holidays or the school schedule. And some of them simply follow what Uncle Screwtape, in C.S. Lewis’ masterwork, called the “Law of Undulation.” Humans have highs and lows. It’s just what we’re like.
Love is this way; marriage is this way; parenting is this way; friendships are this way. All vocations are this way; work and pleasure are this way, and a life in the faith is this way. These periods of highs and lows are built into the way we live in the world. It’s often not enjoyable, but it is inevitable.
But it’s so easy to mistake these natural valleys for failure or crisis or doom, rather than what they are: part of a cycle, something you have moved past before and will move past again.
The perspective of eternity
There are exceptions. Sometimes there really is an extraordinary crisis that doesn’t and shouldn’t fit into the normal ups and downs of life, and you really do need to come to a screeching halt and figure out what to do, because things can’t go on this way. Sometimes things are so intolerable that no amount of patience or perspective helps. Sometimes it isn’t something that will or should resolve itself; you have to break the pattern.
If this is the case, and if you find that it’s not very useful or comforting to zoom out and look at the long view of your life, then try to zoom even further out, and look at the long view of human life in general. And remember who it is that has that view.
Facebook may be programmed to witlessly categorize your life into tidy annual recurring events, but God your Father has numbered the hairs on your head. He sees your sorrows more clearly than you do yourself, and God the Son has felt them. He brought the single-celled zygote that was you into temporal being through pure love, and he knows and recognizes you even as every cell in your body recedes in its turn and is replaced by another, until that process is over and you pass into eternity, and the whole time, he is keeping you in existence.
In other words: You may find yourself in a trough, in a pit, in a place lower than you thought you could go, but you are not there alone. God still knows you, and loves you, and wants to help you live.
This is the great secret, greater than the secret of normal highs and lows: We have a father in heaven who is eternal, and a brother in Jesus who has dipped his foot into the stream of time, and they, too, know the patterns of human life, and what it’s all for.
The one unchanging constant
If we are at the mercy of a larger force, it’s not a faceless, impersonal aggregator like social media. It’s something inexpressibly better: the mercy of God. Who knows us at our highs and at our lows, who sees us when we feel strong and when we feel weak, and who loves us at our best and at our worst. Who knows our habits and can give us the power to break them. Whether we are sinking or rising, we can call to him, and he will hear us, and eventually — not on our schedule, but on his! — bring us back close to him.
Uncle Screwtape thought the highs and lows of humanity were revolting and a sign of how ridiculous human beings are. Gerard Manley Hopkins — probably as near to the opposite of Screwtape as you can come — saw the changful, fickle, variegated world and loved it. And he saw in it a reason to bless God.
All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.
That is what it’s always right to do, no matter where we are, high or low, in control or in despair, well or ill, hopeful or despondent, with or without bronchitis, adazzle or dim: Praise him, if you can. And if you can’t, at least look to him. He is changeless, eternal, and waiting for you.
