The retreat was in a house on forested land. I took my head full of stress and emotion out wandering in the mossy woods every day. Each morning, each walk, each conversation, each dinner, I kept watching and waiting for a moment. I didn’t know what it would look like or when it would happen, but I was waiting for the moment when I would think “Ah. This is why I came.” I wanted reassurance that all the emotional turmoil had a purpose, a use. I wanted to be able to see the good coming from it. I waited all week long and never had that moment. I had good memories and hard ones, but no single moment strong enough to redeem the struggle.
My house sits in a valley reclaimed from desert. I sit in my back garden looking up at the mountains and at the trees I planted with my own hands fifteen years ago. It has been a month since that retreat and I can now see the multitude of ways that the retreat has been useful. Pieces of experience are repurposed into stories. Realizations and thoughts from the retreat have sent out tendrils into my life causing tiny shifts. The effects of those shifts are only just beginning to show. Since the retreat I have had a dozen small moments where I think “Ah. That makes sense now.” Individually these moments don’t outweigh the struggle, but they continue to accumulate.
I knew this already. Even in the middle of the retreat, when I was waiting for a moment, I knew that the value of a struggle lays in what comes afterward. In the midst of my radiation therapy all I could do was manage a day at a time. Later those experiences gave me the tools I needed to help other people and survive other things. That medical struggle reforged my marriage and taught me spiritual endurance which continues to help me. I’d already learned that when I struggle to keep going beyond the limits of my strength, then for ever afterward my limitations are further out than they were before.
Today Link came home from school and described a mile run that he participated in during his PE class. It involved alternating sprints and walks. I listened to Link describe how he’d tackled the run and I heard the confidence in his voice, because he knew that he’d pushed himself to his physical limits and was surprised to discover that they were further out than he expected. He is now a person who passes others when running instead of being passed. “I didn’t know I could do that, Mom.” Link is finally seeing the value in all the sore muscles he’s experienced in the past two months.
It is hard in the middle of hard times to believe that anything good will come out of them, but growth is born from struggle.
I remember the day in PE class when I decided I’d see how long I could stay with the lead girl instead of walking when I started breathing hard. I kept going long enough that when she decided to walk, I knew I could keep running even though breathing was hard. I ended up being the first of the girls, and finishing before most of the boys. That day helped me decide to be a distance runner and do cross country as my sport. It also helped me get a diagnosis of exercise induced asthma — which got me an inhaler which let me run further and faster. It was an important day in my life. Good for Link.