When I was about 10 or 11, and trying as hard as I could to be a good swimmer, I was told by the swim club's coach that some swimmers are fast and others should consider water ballet. Maybe he didn't say it exactly like that, but that was the message I heard. Up to this point, I'd managed to 'compete' in only one swim meet and that was in the exhibition lane. (For those unfamiliar with the exhibition lane, it's a designated lane usually one of the side lanes, where coaches place slower swimmers giving them a sense of what being a 'real' competitor feels like, perhaps to serve as motivation to work harder at being a faster swimmer.) I was actually stopped before I'd completed my final lap and asked to exit the pool so the next 'heat' could begin. I'm pretty sure, though memory is a tricky thing, that the next practice is when the coach shared his words of wisdom.
I was already humiliated, from the meet. (I'd had to exit the pool, and walk it's length back to where my towel was and the other swimmers were congregating between heats. Talk about a walk of shame!). And I'd already contemplated other options, like not returning to the swim club ever and running away from home where no one would know about my failure. I was fairly certain, however, that because of that failure, nothing else would happen to me. It seemed in my pre-adolescent brain, that God imposed a quota system for his believers. That if something shitty happened to you, then you were protected to from any other bad things. Unfortunately, I was wrong because shortly after the swim meet, I experienced a life-changing trauma (I won't go into detail here) that forever should have abolished my idea of God's quota system.
The idea has lingered in my psyche, however, throughout my life. And I believe that many of us have the same kind of thoughts when it comes to bad things happening to people we love. We say things like, "how much more can they handle" or "I think she/he has had all they can take", As if, because some one has something bad happen to them, they are insulated or protected from more bad shit coming their way. We need look no further than Job to see the error of that thinking. I mean, Job lost everything and not all at once but bit by shitty bit. If there were a protection, he didn't get any. And that summer when I was 10 or 11, neither did I.
And if I needed further proof that we're not insulated, this year with my touch of cancer was that proof because we learned a while back that my love of my life, my partner through all has prostate cancer. John was told by his doctor that it's highly curable and he could even wait up to a year to get treatment. The doctor, knowing that I was currently undergoing breast cancer treatment, was trying to provide some of that insulation from bad shit by giving us an option so we both didn't need to go through cancer treatment at the same time. The imagined quota system, once again put to pasture. Our plan, as of this writing, is for John to begin radiation shortly after Michael and Carmen's wedding and after my lumpectomy. And we are approaching this diagnosis with the same positivity that we approached mine - we're going to kick cancer's ass.
I am thinking, maybe I should pen a book entitled "Why Shitty Things Happen to Okay People; Proving God Does Not Have a Quota".
I was already humiliated, from the meet. (I'd had to exit the pool, and walk it's length back to where my towel was and the other swimmers were congregating between heats. Talk about a walk of shame!). And I'd already contemplated other options, like not returning to the swim club ever and running away from home where no one would know about my failure. I was fairly certain, however, that because of that failure, nothing else would happen to me. It seemed in my pre-adolescent brain, that God imposed a quota system for his believers. That if something shitty happened to you, then you were protected to from any other bad things. Unfortunately, I was wrong because shortly after the swim meet, I experienced a life-changing trauma (I won't go into detail here) that forever should have abolished my idea of God's quota system.
The idea has lingered in my psyche, however, throughout my life. And I believe that many of us have the same kind of thoughts when it comes to bad things happening to people we love. We say things like, "how much more can they handle" or "I think she/he has had all they can take", As if, because some one has something bad happen to them, they are insulated or protected from more bad shit coming their way. We need look no further than Job to see the error of that thinking. I mean, Job lost everything and not all at once but bit by shitty bit. If there were a protection, he didn't get any. And that summer when I was 10 or 11, neither did I.
And if I needed further proof that we're not insulated, this year with my touch of cancer was that proof because we learned a while back that my love of my life, my partner through all has prostate cancer. John was told by his doctor that it's highly curable and he could even wait up to a year to get treatment. The doctor, knowing that I was currently undergoing breast cancer treatment, was trying to provide some of that insulation from bad shit by giving us an option so we both didn't need to go through cancer treatment at the same time. The imagined quota system, once again put to pasture. Our plan, as of this writing, is for John to begin radiation shortly after Michael and Carmen's wedding and after my lumpectomy. And we are approaching this diagnosis with the same positivity that we approached mine - we're going to kick cancer's ass.
I am thinking, maybe I should pen a book entitled "Why Shitty Things Happen to Okay People; Proving God Does Not Have a Quota".
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