By Colleen Tinker
“After your surgery, you can ride in one of those electric carts when we shop at Costco,” Richard said to me with a little more enthusiasm than I thought he should have.
I tried to be objective and chose to keep my inside thoughts from coming out.
“You don’t want to be like Kathleen,” my husband continued, referring to an eighty-something woman we knew well. “She’s so sick she can’t remember what she needs to purchase when she goes grocery shopping, but she refuses to ride one of those carts because she’s too proud to be seen as handicapped.”
He had a point. Kathleen’s need to be perfect and self-sufficient defied reality. It was no secret she was ill and suffering, but never would she bow to assistive devices or ask for help.
Her situation was ironic; Kathleen was Adventist to the core. She had spent her career working for “the church”, defending Ellen White in spite of her cognitive dissonance. Even when she experienced the deception and manipulation of the “powers that be”, she rationalized, “That’s not the Adventism I believe in.”
Kathleen had committed her life to the Adventist lifestyle, moving over the decades from vegetarianism with the occasional egg and cottage cheese to full-on veganism in spite of chronic health issues. She desperately needed animal protein because of an autoimmune condition that prohibited her eating many plant-based protein sources, but no. She was faithful to “present truth” and spent her dwindling energy preparing her limited menu while she literally suffered the results of sub-nutrition.
Her refusal to use the electric carts in the grocery store was part of her persistent belief that she deserved to be strong and healthy because she had honored the health message. To stoop to using the carts would be admitting defeat. Her loyalty to Adventism deserved a long and healthy life, not barely-managed trips to the store punctuated by the insult of riding in that despised handicapped cart!
No, I did not want to be like Kathleen.
Naming the dread
I have thought about my resistance to that cart; it represented something to me that I didn’t want to face. And if I am truthful, there is something in me that really does echo Kathleen’s mindset more than I want to admit.
I realize perfectionism is not unique to Adventism, but I do know that within Adventism there is a powerful agenda for being better than those that don’t practice the “health message” and the keeping of the seventh day. In fact, this agenda is only strengthened by the Adventist Health Studies and by the National Geographic’s designating Loma Linda a “Blue Zone” characterized by unusual longevity and healthful living.
I learned as a child that not only my long-term health and lifespan would benefit from vegetarianism and exercise, but my spiritual acuteness would expand as well. In fact, I took those messages so seriously that even though I knew that eating beef and chicken was not technically a sin, to eat them was to choose to go against God’s perfect plan. I could expect to have cancer, heart disease, or any number of other ailments.
If I made excuses for drinking coffee, as I did, I was moving away from the gray area of not-quite-sin into deliberate rebellion. I knew I was bargaining with my life and health.
Since I learned the gospel and realized that my eternal life was utterly unrelated to my diet and exercise but was entirely the work of our sovereign God who made the Lord Jesus a propitiation for sin, my life has never been the same. I have lived in a growing gratitude for Jesus and in an increasing realization of how unable I have ever been to be a better Christian by disciplining my body and appetite. My eternal life is the Lord’s resurrection power in me; I do not increase my spiritual strength or my qualifications for service by my diet!
Why, then, did I feel such dread about riding that Costco cart?
Facing the shame
During these first two-and-a-half weeks since my knee replacement surgery, I have struggled with my body. I have asked myself why I had a knee that completely ceased to function—and I am not even able to point to any athletic prowess or other physical accomplishment. In fact, not only am I not an athlete, but I am the girl who struck out playing workup softball in the ninth grade, lost my balance, hit myself on the back of the head, and collapsed on home plate. [I have no memory of ever playing ball again, although I must have…]
In other words, my shame over my athletic inability knew no bounds. Oh, I compensated; I jogged as a young adult—until joint pains stopped me—and even then I never stopped walking, hiking, and pushing myself physically. I even became anorexic in my 20’s and early 30’s as I tried desperately to have control over my physical health and appearance. Even after being born again, I still hung onto a compulsion to be in charge of my body by beating it into submission. My early Adventist imprinting didn’t automatically leave when I finally knew the Lord; I believed I was somehow “better” if I was thin, fit, and strong.
Now here I am. My left knee paid a price I refused to ponder as a young Adventist woman—and as a maturing Christian woman. Last week as I struggled with pain and inflammation that the meds weren’t quite managing, I found myself thinking like my old self.
On the one hand, the physician’s assistant and the physical therapist were telling me that my range of motion were “way ahead of the game” compared to the average post-surgical knee replacement, but as my incision area swelled, became purplish, and landed me in the doctor’s office to rule out an infection, I tried to understand.
I realized my thinking was flawed, but I began to wonder if God was allowing me to have complications in order to keep me from being proud of my range of motion.
I know—that thinking sounds crazy—and it is. Nevertheless, I was thinking as I had learned to think as an Adventist girl. I had to “do my best” for God to bless me, but if I became proud or successful, God would punish me to keep me humble.
I realized as well that part of my resistance to having this surgery in the first place was much the same as Kathleen’s resistance to riding the grocery store cart: it was a public admission that I failed to keep myself healthy, and I was past my prime. God was “taking me out”, and I was no longer qualified to represent Him adequately.
Oh, I knew my thinking was flawed, but these ideas were deeply embedded in my sense of identity, and I realized I was facing the destructiveness of the Adventist belief that humans are merely bodies that breathe.
Somehow this knee replacement has brought to light one of the crippling facts of that “Adventist lifestyle”: it is a false reality! First, physical discipline, as Paul says in 1 Timothy 4:8, “is only of little profit,” and refusing to touch, handle, or taste foods has “the appearance of wisdom in self-made religion and self-abasement and severe treatment of the body, but are of no value against fleshly indulgence” (Col. 2:20, 23).
Second, I cannot earn God’s blessing for health by practicing what I believe to be a “healthy lifestyle”. Don’t get me wrong; there is a connection between lifestyle and health, but veganism and vegetarianism do not guarantee longer life or better health. Furthermore, God is not obligated to bless me with health or fast healing because I have been faithful to eschew meat and coffee.
Even more, my health, whether good or poor, says nothing about my spiritual health. As Paul recounts in 2 Corinthians 12:7–10 when he tells how he begged God to remove the thorn in his flesh, God responded with these words, “My grace is sufficient for you, for power is perfected in weakness.” In other words, I cannot interpret my physical condition as evidence of God’s pleasure or displeasure with me. In fact, my health has nothing at all to do with His approval of me! Instead, my condition is for the purpose of His glory—regardless of what that condition is. I am His—including my worn-out, replaced knee.
Finally, the Lord is reminding me that He is faithful. He is my true Father, and He does not trick me or passive-aggressively punish me for my flaws. He wants me to trust Him regardless of what might be happening in my heart or my body. I can know that my scarred purple knee is not His management of me so I won’t be happy about my range of motion!
Redemption
My Wednesday trip to the doctor’s office yielded unexpected results. My knee is not infected, but they ended the post-surgical protocol of blood thinners a week early and allowed me to take ibuprofen—contraindicated when on blood thinners—for inflammation. Within 24 hours the pain and swelling had improved.
I left the doctor’s office realizing that an electric cart at Costco was not a sentence on the value of my life; it was a provision I could actually enjoy while I allowed the Lord to heal my body in His time and way.
He is not punitive. He has given me a husband who has helped me keep my perspective through this new post-surgical journey, and what’s more, Richard saw the humor in this next stage of recovery.
For the first time ever, I entered Costco this week riding the “handicapped cart” with it’s tight turning radius, it’s back-up beeper, the orange caution flag floating high over my head, and a speed that never catches up to my normal walk. As I motored down the aisles, I saw Richard racing ahead of me and focusing his iPhone on me from positions behind stacks of oranges and paper plates. It was appropriate; I could embrace this!
The cart is only for a little while, and Richard’s humor and enjoyment in capturing our first-of-a-kind Costco trip just made me laugh. The Lord has graciously given me a new lease on life; I can walk without a limp, and He is not done with me. What’s more, this knee replacement is a provision, not a judgment.
On top of it all, He has given us the gift of humor in the middle of this sometimes daunting journey. My true Father asks me to trust Him for what I need, and His provisions for me are above anything I can ask or imagine!
YOUTUBE LINK: Please share this redeeming moment of the Costco Cart with me!
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