The Journey

A few years back I was a real fan of the TV show The Biggest Loser.  For those unfamiliar with this program, it was about weight loss.  They would get a group of morbidly obese people (and that description is being kind) and exercise them like crazy.  Each week whoever had lost the least amount of weight would be eliminated.  At the end of the season there would be a final weigh-in, and The Biggest Loser  would be revealed on live TV.  Of course, like any reality TV show, there were a lot of twists and turns.  I found myself rooting for some and hoping others would be that week’s contestant to get the boot!  I don’t know how many episodes Joy and I had watched before we began to notice something.  Sometime in every show, and often more than once, a contestant or one of the trainers would refer to this whole weight loss process as a journey.  Now, I don’t object to their use of the word; in fact, the term seems appropriate for an endeavor that takes you someplace, especially if that place is somewhere you want to go.  I just was struck by the fact that everyone used it, often repeatedly.  I suppose that was about the time that I began to notice how ubiquitous that word journey  is these days.  I have heard it used for both a process and a place.  Besides weight loss, I have heard the term journey  applied to a year in college, a romance, drug addiction, and thankfully recovery.  When it comes to nouns, I have read of a nightclub and a church that go by the one-word name “Journey.”  Somewhere between those two extremes I came across a Journey  that is an “escape room,” where you and some friends are locked into a room and have to follow clues to escape.  

It might be overused, but the word journey  is a good one to describe a process, and as I said, especially if that is to someplace you want to go.  That is why I was struck by a use of the word that didn’t sit well with me.  I am part of a Facebook group that is made up of people touched by Corticobasal Degeneration, which is often abbreviated CBD.  I had posted something about my continuing decline, and another member of the group responded, “The journey to brokenness and humility is difficult.”  That is the journey I am on, and it certainly isn’t someplace I want to go.  I realize the word journey  is value neutral.  It doesn’t have to describe the trip to a positive place; I just thought that in an overwhelming majority of times it would be positive.  How can “brokenness and humility” be positive?  I can see that humility, properly understood, is a virtue, but when it means the destruction of one’s sense of self-worth it isn’t.  “The journey to brokenness and humility” is just a phrase which I am confident was written with compassion for my situation, but I took it wrong.  I don’t want to be either broken or humbled.  After some late-night reflection, I realized that those two words are a fair description of my situation.  I am broken, and I am trying to learn the virtue of humility.

For those not familiar with CBD, the genesis of the problem is the death of cells in the brain.  Because of where those brain cells are, I am currently being systematically robbed of the ability to walk, to talk, and to control my emotions.  The disease will eventually affect my arms and can result in dementia.  They say you don’t die from CBD, you die with it.  Because of increasing difficulty with swallowing, aspirational pneumonia is a frequent cause of death as well as sepsis.  Personally, I fear ending up in a nursing home totally dependent and not having the reasoning power to know why any of this is happening.  The “D” in CBD stands for degeneration, and that means this is a progressive disease; it will get worse and worse until I die.  The neurologists say the average life expectancy is 6 to 8 years from diagnosis to death.  I was diagnosed in 2015.  Do the math. 

Yes, whether I deny it or not, I am broken, but am I humble?  As I have already said, I don’t want to be humbled.  To my way of thinking there is a great difference between humbling yourself and being humbled by some outside force.  The Hebrew word in the Old Testament that is rendered humbled is used in both ways.  More than once God calls upon His people to humble themselves.  I am not fighting that meaning of humility.  A couple of times the Hebrew word is used as a euphemism for rape.  I am fighting that meaning of humility.  I don’t want CBD to break my will.  I don’t want it to fill my days with fear and regret, be the continuing preoccupation of my life, and suck all of the joy out of living.  

What, then, is this virtue called humility, especially as it applies to my situation?  I have thought a lot about that, probably because I come by pride, humility’s opposite, very naturally.  You may be thinking that is true of all of us, and you would be right, but I have observed that I have it to a greater degree than most.  I once heard a prideful person described as one who wants to be the bride at every wedding and the corpse at every funeral!  I am not there, but I do have what seems to me to be an exaggerated sense of self-importance.  That runs contrary to one of the core ideas the New Testament speaks of, being like Jesus. Now, let’s be clear, we are not brought into a right relationship to God by our imitation of Christ.  That would be putting the cart before the horse, but once we are “born again” we are to act like we are part of the family.  That means following in Christ’s footsteps is the path we take.  Well, what does that mean when it comes to humility?  According to the letter the Apostle Paul wrote to the church at Philippi, a Christian is to have the mind of Christ (Philippians 2:5), and lest there be any question about what that means, he goes on to give a specific example.  In the eighth verse of that same chapter Paul writes, “He humbled Himself and became obedient to the point of death, even the death of the cross.” Jesus humbled Himself.  He consciously submitted to the will of His Father, even though that meant death.  Humility, in the Christian sense of that word, means submitting to God’s will.  It means more than that, but I know it means at least that.  

Am I broken?  Yes, but not as broken as I will be short of divine intervention.  Am I humble?  Well, let’s put it this way, I am more humble now than when all of this started.  As that Facebook friend put it, “The journey to brokenness and humility is difficult.”  Yes, it is, but like John Bunyan’s character Christian, I am just a pilgrim, who with God’s help, is making progress.  That is my journey.