New Beginnings

I wept uncontrollably while watching the season ending to Law & Order SVU last week. After being shot in the neck, the agent was facing a lifetime ahead of being paralyzed from the neck down. Laying motionless in his hospital bed he turned first to his sibling... "I need your help with something, brother."

At first confused, his brother responded inquisitively. And then realizing what he was asking for, he began crying. "I can't. I just can't." Leaving the room, the agents dad came through the door. You never saw what came next but, you knew what was coming. It would only be five or ten minutes later that the hospital bells and alarms were ringing. Doctors and nurses were running down the halls as the agents friends followed. He was dead and the continuous flatline ringing of his heart monitor deafened the room - both in tv and our home living room.

It's not my first exposure to the conversation of euthanasia as a spinal cord injury, myself. As I confessed to my wife after the show, "I know all the right answers! I cognitively see the injustices of propagating a euthanasia narrative, both fictitiously and in real theory. But after undergoing so much loss over the past two years and seeing where our society is going... I get it! I get what he was thinking!"

I know all the right answers! I cognitively see the injustices of propagating a euthanasia narrative, both fictitiously and in real theory. But after undergoing so much loss over the past two years and seeing where our society is going... I get it! I get what he was thinking!

Am I wrong?! I honestly don't know anymore. But it seems like there is so much confusion around what it means to be disabled these days. What does "disability" mean and how does it impact who you are as a human being? Is there still dignity in life when you face such profound loss to your physical and mental identity? Where can I/we find hope when all seems lost?

Over the past two years, and after a long hospital stay of a year and a half (most of which was of being confined to one room alone and on bedrest), I have been on a bit of a dry spell in writing and public expression. My blog spaces dried up, my podcast went cold, and I found it extremely hard to find any drive to be creative in any way.

Maybe here at the bottom of the well is a place to start again. Maybe... we might find a conversation exploring those questions that have been plaguing my soul, and maybe yours too, for so long... together. The conversation may not always be easy, neat, and pretty. But it will be real, honest, and authentic. Maybe hope is seeing and hearing the deafening flatline ringing in my/our society finding a new rhythm of life and the promise of... beep... beep... new beginnings.

“Your life is not about killing time in a world you’re “just passing through.” Rather, your salvation is an epic, cross-bearing ascent, further up and further in with Christ. The Good Shepherd is leading us beyond the world’s moth-and-rust-eaten, self-absorbed value systems into fullness of life—here, now, and forever. He’s constructing in us the eternal life of love, joy, peace, beauty, truth, and justice. And that, my friend—your LIFE in Christ—IS your salvation journey.”

— Out of the Embers: Faith After the Great Deconstruction by Bradley Jersak