It is what it is
And it’s so much more than it seems. by Lori Ann Wood
I
gingerly pushed open the door marked 108a, terrified of what I might see on the other side. She beckoned me in from her hospital bed with a blunt acceptance, “It is what it is.”
My friend of 25 years had just been diagnosed with ALS, Lou Gehrig’s Disease. She had fallen and broken her foot, and in investigating the cause, doctors discovered the devastating culprit.
ȷustbetweenus
winter 2021
Before I visited, I had to do some research. According to the ALS Association website, “ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis) is a progressive neurodegenerative disease that affects nerve cells in the brain and the spinal cord. There is no cure. Once ALS starts, it almost always progresses—taking away the ability to walk, dress, write, speak, swallow, and breathe—shortening the life span.”
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I noticed my friend’s familiar, well-worn Bible on her bed table. Countless times she and her husband had stood at my own hospital bed, and at the bedsides, curbsides, and gravesides of others. As Abraham and Sarah, they had so often comforted outsiders on their journey. Like Abraham, the father of our faith, my friend and her husband have parented hundreds, if not thousands, along their trek to belief.
In all those similarities, I had a strange notion that God was abandoning her now. And I feared she felt it, too. Her words cut into my own fragile faith that day. “It is what it is.” Abraham may have uttered those very words, or at least harbored those sentiments. Not long after three travel-weary strangers entered the door to Abraham’s tent, they prophesied that he and Sarah would be parents within a year, reiterating God’s earlier promises of a robust lineage. Nearly a century old, Abraham knew his own physical limitations. Somehow, his faith remained intact. “Without weakening in his faith, he faced the fact that his body was as good as dead—since he was about a hundred years old—and that Sarah’s womb was also dead. Yet he did not waver through unbelief regarding the promise of God but was strengthened in his faith and gave glory to God, being fully persuaded that God had power to do what he had promised” (Rom. 4:19-21). In that ordinary hospital room, my friend began teaching me Abraham’s three extraordinary faith lessons.
