Contours of Illness and Healing

/ Elizabeth Trotter / 1 Comment

I was sick for a while before I knew I was sick. I’d been tired. So tired. I’m normally a lower-energy person who needs more rest than others, but this was extreme. I supposed it was more perimenopause.

I had aches and pains. By the end of the day, I felt like I had the flu. I couldn’t wait to relax in a warm shower for a few minutes and then lie flat in bed. I used to take a walk in the evening, but I didn’t even have the stamina for that anymore. 

I assumed it was aging. I’ve heard you get a lot of aches and pains as you get older. I thought this was just my life now, a life where everything hurt all the time. I simply had to get used to it.

I was having a lot of what I believed to be hot flashes, even though I’m on HRT. My face would flush, and I would overheat, sweating profusely, sometimes while on a work call. It was just menopause, though. Right? 

I was so tired, I could barely work. Even when I was awake, I struggled to focus on the task in front of me. I knew menopause came with brain fog, but this was next-level. Would I ever be able to concentrate again?

I was out of breath all the time, pulling back on exercise, and it seemed not even sleep could restore my strength. I remember one weekend in particular we were going to have a family night, and after my nap I could barely lift my hands. What was wrong with me?

I was discouraged because I had just finished this beautiful month of semi-sabbatical in May. I’d spent time restoring my relationships and renewing my creativity. I had ideas and energy for moving forward in life, then bam! Hard stop.

You know how moms take their kids to the doctor — or at least call the doctor — at the first sign something is wrong, but we don’t always take ourselves? Um, yeah, that was me. Until I could barely sleep, swallow, or move for the pain.

So one morning I finally dragged myself to the doctor. I feared an autoimmune disease. They happen more to women in their 40s and 50 — and more to women in general. And I know enough of the medical world to know that sometimes people contract viruses such as Ebstein-Barr (which causes mono and which I got tested for) and never recover. They remain ill, sometimes bedbound, permanently.

Thankfully it didn’t look like my tests were pointing to anything permanent or autoimmune, but to something else: thyroiditis. The pace of recovery would be slow. Sometimes there would be no improvement day to day, and I would only notice improvement from week to week. Sometimes I would get worse instead of better, as progress turned to regress. And truth be told, I’m not fully recovered yet.

I’ve been seriously ill before, but it’s been many years. Most of the time when I get sick, I’m down for a couple days, and then I recover. And although I had lots of people praying for me this time around, I have to admit I wasn’t always very patient in waiting for improvement or healing. Whenever I was conscious, that is.

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Several months ago I asked God to expand my horizons. One Sunday during communion I went forward for the bread and the cup, and when I returned to my seat, a prayer from long ago popped into my mind, and I prayed it. 

I hadn’t thought of the prayer of Jabez in a quarter of a century, and I certainly wasn’t praying it in a prosperity-gospel type of way. Still, although I’d intended the petition for one area of my life, God seemed to be answering it in other areas. He opened invitations and pathways I didn’t see coming. Stirred my heart to long for more depth, more fruit, more of Him in my life. I started seeking, pulling on the threads of my desires.

Until I got sick. I lay on the recliner for weeks. I had a little supply bag — books, phone, sudoku, water or rehydration mix, sugar-free mints. Still, most of what I did was sleep. Monitor temperature and heart rate. Manage pain and pills. I basically lost the month of June; my children can attest to this.

As I recovered, I knew I needed to rebuild my capacity. Slowly begin small amounts of work. Slowly start to move my body more. Keep resting a lot, trying not to overdo anything or push myself too soon. 

But as I continued improving, I remembered all this deep work I’d done before my health declined. And I suddenly saw that the daily habits of my life weren’t sturdy enough to support the spiritual, creative, and vocational expansion I was longing for and starting to step into. I needed better scaffolding for my life, a better structure to hold all the plans and dreams that were being birthed inside me.

If I wanted to be more fruitful, I needed a healthier support system to cultivate that growth. I couldn’t just rebuild my former capacity. I needed to build more capacity than before.

And so I outlined ways to make that happen. I scrutinized my daily schedule, figuring out where I was losing time to news reels, task switching, internet scrolling. Ascertaining how to stack the daily routines of meal prep, personal care, household tasks. Learning how to bundle and batch, streamline and save. 

Turns out, I was scattering my tasks simply because I could. Because I work from home and can do anything at any time. And also because my midlife brain is so distractible. But then again, this is how I lived for years as a homeschool mom, flitting from one need to the next, never knowing if I would finish a task before a child needed me for something else.

I hadn’t realized that I was fissioning away my days. I had to do nothing for a month to realize that I could do more than the somethings I was doing before.

But I also know I recoil from strict schedules. I do much better being able to finish a task before moving onto the next, even if the clock says it’s time. The perfectionist in me hates a schedule. I thought back to the early days of homeschooling and how I’d approached our days. I’d developed a routine for ourselves — a particular order to our tasks and a general time placement for them, whether before breakfast, before lunch, before dinner, or before bed.

Something too structured, and I collapse in fear of failure. Something too loose, and I don’t accomplish enough. The concept of scaffolding seemed spacious enough, sturdy enough, to balance these competing inclinations and still hold my dreams and desires.

Even before I got sick, I’d had a hunger to go deeper into the spiritual life, the creative life. I’d been working through books and chatting with friends about these things. I’d been a little bit wander-y, of course, but I’d been on the right track. I feared I’d lost the momentum with this illness. 

But that doesn’t have to be true. I can build a better scaffolding to support the bigger, more expansive life I’m dreaming of. I’ve always had limited capacity, and even more so in midlife, but as I heal from physical sickness, I’m reaching for more capacity. I guess that’s what dreams, visions, invitations will do to you — prompt you to alter things that aren’t working so you can open your soul to something new.

Seen in this light, I suppose even sickness has its upsides.

Mama Said

/ Elizabeth Trotter / Leave a comment

My mom was an Army wife. She told me that things always go wrong when a dad is out of town — whether deployed or out for field exercises or summer training. All the Army wives knew it was true. 

A kid would get seriously sick, or the car would break down, or something would go wrong with the house when a dad was gone. It was a fact of life they had no choice but to accept. One time a toddler ended up in the hospital while my dad was gone. Another time Mom had a baby. (Thank God for supportive church people, right?!)

But this truism ended up applying to more than military life. Ministry life felt much the same.

I remember being six months pregnant with my fourth child when Kansas City received torrential downpours. Jonathan was at Bible camp with the youth group, and the parsonage basement flooded over fifteen inches. It short-circuited both the air conditioning system and the (newly replaced) hot water heater, which now both needed replacing, and ruined most of what we’d stored down there — books and family photo albums in cardboard boxes which we had carefully placed on top of stone blocks. 

But the water level rose above those stones, and capillary action on the cardboard ensured total damage. I needed an entire team of people to help empty the basement of its boxes and furniture, now ruined, try to salvage anything we could, and toss the rest. Later that week a nearby water main broke, and we didn’t have water at all for a while, which was even worse than trying to shower in cold water a few days before. 

After that, we stored our belongings in plastic boxes on even higher blocks.

I remember another time when we lived in Cambodia and Jonathan was on an international trip and I got sick. He wasn’t planning to come straight home though. He was going to meet me and the kids in Thailand, where we were scheduled to be the keynote speakers at a home education conference.

I had to figure out how to get better and still make it to the conference with four kids in tow. Asian airlines and airports have been checking for fevers long before COVID-19 hit the world, so I didn’t actually know if I would make it to the conference. That week involved a lot of praying, phone calling, and Tylenol swallowing.

Something similar happened again recently. Jonathan was just about to leave for an international ministry trip when I became seriously ill. I couldn’t concentrate, I was in constant pain, and I could barely get out of bed, but I somehow dragged myself to the doctor for testing. What I was diagnosed with (thyroiditis) was going to require a long recovery, but there were some medications that could help manage symptoms in the meantime. 

Then it was time to decide whether he should leave on the ministry trip or not. I was in bad shape, and he offered to stay home and care for me. But I really felt he still needed to go. People were depending on him — some people were attending the event specifically to meet with him. Plus, I had all these older teen and adult children who could help, in addition to an amazing local church family. One thing I know for sure: the prayers of the saints have held me these past couple weeks.

This illness isn’t fun. I actually got worse for a little while after he left. But the experience reminded me of my mama’s wisdom. Things always seem to go wrong just when the person who is supposed to help you navigate the trials of life is also gone. Is it chance, happenstance, spiritual warfare? I don’t know. I do know that my husband and I have often fought just before a big ministry event — so much so that he began to expect it. 

This time around we didn’t fight. I got sick instead. 

I’ve never been one to accuse the devil of much. I’ve seen the practice misused. But sometimes it’s hard not to draw spiritual conclusions. This illness was so unexpected. I’ve never had thyroid problems, and they don’t run in my family. I’m generally healthy. Yet right before Jonathan was supposed to leave for an eleven-day trip to do some really important ministry, I was diagnosed with a temporarily debilitating illness.

The truth is, maybe we’ll never know the reasons these things happen. But as every military, ministry, and missionary wife knows, they do tend to happen. The question then becomes: What are we going to do when they happen?

Wars, Plagues, and Fires: Is This How the World Ends?

/ Elizabeth Trotter / Leave a comment

Saddled with an anxious mind, it’s easy for me to go bleak. Hopeless. Straight to the end of the world. It’s easy to look around at world or national events and think, it’s never been this bad before.

But this is not a new habit of mine. I’ve been fast-forwarding to Armageddon for years. This tells me it’s not about the age in which I live but about the mind I inhabit.

There is, as always, reason to fear. Recently some have said that we are closer to nuclear war now than we have been since the Cold War. (Note: I originally wrote those words in April 2024, shortly after the war in Israel had begun.)

But in times like these I remember what C.S. Lewis had to say in his 1948 essay, “On Living in an Atomic Age,” and I go reread it. You probably already know it, but here it is just in case:

In one way we think a great deal too much of the atomic bomb. ‘How are we to live in an atomic age?’ I am tempted to reply: ‘Why, as you would have lived in the sixteenth century when the plague visited London almost every year, or as you would have lived in a Viking age when raiders from Scandinavia might land and cut your throat any night; or indeed, as you are already living in an age of cancer, an age of syphilis, an age of paralysis, an age of air raids, an age of railway accidents, an age of motor accidents.’

In other words, do not let us begin by exaggerating the novelty of our situation. Believe me, dear sir or madam, you and all whom you love were already sentenced to death before the atomic bomb was invented: and quite a high percentage of us were going to die in unpleasant ways. We had, indeed, one very great advantage over our ancestors – anaesthetics; but we have that still. It is perfectly ridiculous to go about whimpering and drawing long faces because the scientists have added one more chance of painful and premature death to a world which already bristled with such chances and in which death itself was not a chance at all, but a certainty.

This is the first point to be made: and the first action to be taken is to pull ourselves together. If we are all going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb when it comes find us doing sensible and human things – praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts – not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs. They may break our bodies (a microbe can do that) but they need not dominate our minds.

Of course, that reminds me of this George Orwell quote from his 1946 essay, “Some Thoughts on the Common Toad,” which I’ve also shared before:

The atomic bombs are piling up in the factories, the police are prowling through the cities, the lies are streaming from the loudspeakers, but the earth is still going round the sun, and neither the dictators nor the bureaucrats, deeply as they disapprove of the process, are able to prevent it.

And that reminds me of what we learned in homeschool history class. Specifically, what we learned in Chapter 12 of Susan Wise Bauer’s The Story of the World Volume 3: Early Modern Times. The setting was London, the 1650s and ‘60s. First there was a long, drawn-out war followed by an extremely unpopular governing regime. Then there was a plague. And finally, there was a disaster that destroyed half the city.

Nearly ten years of the English Civil War—violence, unrest, and oppression. An unpopular religious regime for the next five. Two fifths (forty percent) of London succumbing to the Yersinia pestis bacterium a few years after that. And less than a year later four fifths of London burning to the ground all because the king’s baker had been careless one night.

If I’d been living in London in 1666, at the end of all of that, I would have thought the end of the world was right around the corner. I would have thought Jesus was coming soon. Surely. But I would have been wrong. Nearly four hundred years later, we’re still waiting.

What about Matthew 24 and Jesus’s apparent warnings that the end was happening soon? What about Matthew 25 and the parable of the virgins? Aren’t we supposed to be ready for His return at all times? It could happen at any moment. At least, that’s what I’d heard growing up.

But when our Bible class studied this verse, the teacher explained that it’s not just that we need to be ready for His return to happen soon. We’re also supposed to be ready for it to happen later. To be prepared to stay and wait a long time. The wise ones were prepared for a longer wait — and possibly more suffering — and they were rewarded.

Wars, plagues, and fires. Those are the trials that the English people faced in the 1650s and ‘60s. And they are the trials the modern world has faced in the 2020s. It doesn’t necessarily mean the end of the world is nigh, although it might. But things have always been falling apart. 2026 is no different — though it is personal.

So don’t just be ready to receive Him now. Also be ready to wait. Be ready right now, and be ready later. We don’t know the times, and it’s not our job to know the times. It’s our job to be prepared no matter how long it takes. Even through suffering, even through heartache. It’s our job to settle in and make a life, to raise children and plant gardens, even if we have to wait seventy years, or more.

I remember in 2021 my husband Jonathan was working on a landmark article on codependency and the church. He took a couple months to germinate the seed and complete the essay. And all through that time, I knew I wanted to write about Rose of Sharon.

But he was doing something really important, and we were everywhere surrounded by chaos. I wondered if my desire might be meaningless. So I asked him, “Every day it seems like the world is ending. Should I still write about flowers? How could they possibly matter in the light of all this other stuff?”

You know what he told me? He said, “The end of the world is especially the time to write about flowers.” And then he said something about that C.S. Lewis essay I love so much. (You can search our website for his take on the essay and my take on the essay; apparently we love this essay.)

You know what else? Since I started writing this reflection a couple years ago and then laid it down before picking it back up again recently, my relationship with news-related anxiety has changed. I don’t follow the news so closely anymore. There have been so many brushes with apocalypse that they no longer shock me anymore. It’s seemed like the end of the world so many times that I’ve given up thinking it is. 

I’ve tried to order my loves rightly once again. Looking to history, especially London in the 1650s and ‘60s has helped. But so have the words of Jesus in Matthew 25 and the words of Lewis in his famous essay, along with the essays and book listed below. Because someday it will be the end of the world, and there won’t be any question about it. Everyone will know. But until then, God has work for us to do.

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For further reading:

Why I Can’t Care About Every Crisis (on the challenges of living in two worlds)
What George Orwell and C.S. Lewis can teach us about chaos, creation, and a world living in fear
On Living in Terrible Times by Jonathan Trotter
Reading the News When Crisis Hits by Lilly Rivera 
Stop Burning Out for Jesus by Valerie Limmer
Reading the Times: A Literary and Theological Inquiry into the News by Jeffrey Lyle Bilbro

Midlife Mornings Feel Like Jet Lag

/ Elizabeth Trotter / Leave a comment

You get up early in your 40s. You can’t sleep in no matter how poorly you slept. So you drag yourself out of bed, but your head is dizzy and your thoughts are jumbled and your body is stiff and you’re not quite sure who you are or where you are. You’re not quite alive yet, but slowly you recover from the jet lag that is midlife sleep.

If you’re lucky, if you’ve fine-tuned your supplement regimen and have access to the prescription medications you need, if you’ve adjusted your schedule and are strict with your boundaries, then sure, you’ll ease into the day with increasing energy and brain power. You’ll eventually be able to function. But recovering from morning jet lag is no joke.

Maybe that’s why I prize my morning times so much. They adjust me to the day and time, which I frequently forget in the morning. They awaken me to God. They remind me what’s important in life.

I no longer wake up in an angry funk (hello progesterone intolerance), but I do wake up fuzzy. I can’t walk in a straight line or hold complex conversations yet. Some people might be able to exercise in the morning, but I couldn’t possibly. (I’ve tried.)

It is a truth generally acknowledged in the menopause space that “motion is lotion.” By this, doctors and physical therapists mean that even if we are stiff, we feel better when we move. Sometimes it is this very movement that gets the muscle and fascia fibers unstuck and gliding past each other more freely. But when we stop moving, our bodies start to stiffen, and pain can set in.

I find this menopause truism holds for every aspect of morning wakening, whether in the spiritual or physical realm. Sometimes we just need to start moving. Even if we’re drowsy or foggy, or stiff or sore, or in overwhelm or decision fatigue. We just need to do something. Anything to help the brain, body, and spirit get unstuck and start the day.

So stumble out of bed and wash your face. Pour yourself a cuppa something. Stretch your aching body. Open a book and set your mind on something worthy. Maybe even record the gifts of the day, or the confusion of the night. Then thank God that His mercies are new every morning — especially if you’re in midlife and every morning feels like jet lag.

More Than a Baby Dedication

/ Elizabeth Trotter / Leave a comment

Long before a certain first lady popularized the phrase, the Church has known “it takes a village” to raise a child, to make a disciple. Whether we are parents hoping to shape the soul of a child or adults seemingly in charge of our own spiritual formation, discipleship is not an individual sport. We simply cannot do it on our own. We need help.

Yesterday morning our church held a baby dedication. What a gift to be part of a body whose love for children overflows into the need for once-yearly baby dedications. I’ve seen it before — anyone fellowshipping with Red Bridge Church of Christ in the 1990s witnessed it too — but it doesn’t happen just anywhere.

Watching those parents walk on stage with their little ones, I remembered my own baby dedications. The fresh hope of new parenthood. The weary fog of sleepless nights and never-ending laundry. The overwhelming determination to be a better follower for your son or daughter. And of course those sweet baby kisses.

At the time I didn’t realize that baby dedications are about so much more than committing to raise your kids in church. They’re also about leaning on the wisdom and guidance of others as you muddle through family life. About knowing you have people in your corner, people who believe in what you’re doing and are willing to help you when times get hard.

Now that our kids are older, I find myself able to be that village for younger moms, even as older moms offer the same for me. Just yesterday, in fact, someone ahead of me on the journey checked in on me and encouraged me. I, in turn, did the same for a younger mom — as though our auditorium interactions were illustrating the point of that onstage baby dedication.

During the service, the pastor first asked the parents for their commitment to raising their children in the faith. Then he asked the church to commit to supporting these parents in both spiritual and practical ways. One of the commitments particularly moved me:

“Do you commit, as brothers and sisters in Christ, to continually and lovingly welcome these children into the family of God and affirm their participation in the Kingdom of God, so that they never doubt their belonging amongst His people?”

My eyes welled with tears. Only in the church is this kind of intrinsic, never-fading belonging possible. To be sure, the church gets it wrong sometimes. We have hurt people terribly. I have been hurt. You have been hurt. But when it’s working as God intended, the church is a place for deep, unquestioned belonging. No manmade organization can rival it.

Anna Danforth, Lauren Wells, and the rest of the team over at TCK Training call this “multi-generational belonging.” Kids who receive it feel more grounded and secure, and it helps to offset the difficult things that inevitably happen in life. And it’s something the church has been doing for thousands of years, long before the modern research on Positive Childhood Experiences.

But it’s also something we must commit to in every season, in every generation. For every new baby that’s born, for every new beginning. This kind of belonging doesn’t happen automatically. It happens when we take Christ at His word and welcome a child into our life. It happens when we commit to supporting young moms and dads and when we ask older believers to help illuminate the path for us.

Intergenerational faithfulness is about more than just a baby dedication. It’s about the church being the church for every member, from newborn babe to great-grandmother and everyone in between. Because you belong here — but only if we live like we believe it.