Where My Mind Goes While Buying Life Insurance
I remember when I was prescribed some medicine for acid reflux that my doctor said something rather keen. He said to me, while I was clarifying the nature of the medicine and how to take it, “you have what you have. And you don’t have what you don’t have.” I think he assumed I was lost in my own thoughts, overwhelmed by the miasma of sudden and threatening knowledge. I wasn’t. It was very clear that I had bad acid reflux. If anything, I was relieved to have actually found a name to the burning sensation I felt in the back of my throat most days.
The tautology “you have what you have,” made me think of the general revelation of a new illness in general. The before and after moment of walking into a room thinking, “all is well,” and then walking out realizing, “all is, very much not well,” must be a surreal experience. I had a moment like this when I was younger and found out that I was allergic to bee venom, that I could potentially go into anaphylactic shock if I was stung. The allergist also found that I was allergic to other things as well, but the threat of having to live life differently to fend off unwanted bees felt more real at the time than being allergic to certain types of medication. Today, I am no longer allergic because of a regimen of bee venom treatments to build up my immunity, but at the time I was terrified. For the next five years I would have to get shots in the arm: the worst possible thing I could imagine. (I was about 8 years old at the time.)
After a few months, however, I was completely unphased by this new reality. The novelty of shock had worn off. Granted, I still hate getting shots, but not like I did before, back when two nurses had to hold me down just to get a grade school booster.
Once you accept that “you have what you have,” depending on what have is exactly, life goes on. Despite one of my aunts facing certain death from stage 4 bladder cancer (to which she ultimately succumbed), she drove herself to all her chemo appointments and even made it to part 2 of Avengers: Endgame, proving soundly the life extending capabilities of billion dollar, comic book franchises. (She was also quite the cinephile in general, always interested in the latest stories brought to film.)
At this point, one could introduce the “Problem of Evil”, and speak of the unjustness of “God” enabling such suffering to exist in the first place. Sure. But invoking such an idea as a basis for not believing in “God” gets you no farther than if you had not believed in the first place. Life goes on. “You have what you have.” That’s it. The inherent injustice of receiving an illness that hobbles the body, keeping it from achieving it’s true potential, is only unjust if there’s an implied alternative that should otherwise be the case. (ie. God made us in his image to be his hands and feet in his good and just creation. Our insistence upon going our own way is contrary to what it means to be fundamentally “human,” therefore.) It could even be argued, discounting the presence of a God entirely, that defining what “true potential” encompasses is inherently problematic because it requires something that has agency outside of our reality to establish what actual “potential” is. Anyways…
I think it’s easy to look at the myriad conditions of life and become stuck on the potential, troublesome outcomes. We labor under the illusion that we have control over our lives, when in reality we are at the mercy of other causal agents (like the bus driver that will accidentally hit you while you are crossing the sidewalk in 17 days, maybe). But, at the end of the day, living in a state of constant fear of what may come is pointless. “You have what you have,” should at least be a comfort because, no matter what you believe about the nature of reality and the universe, how we respond to our suffering and circumstances is still in our control. Above and beyond this, I can argue, as a Christian, that the Living God brings context to suffering, in that its presence is an aberration of true reality. That Jesus renews and restores the world, and sustains us in perpetuity in life after life after death at the end of space time. Whatever your persuasion, acknowledging our lack of control gives us a praxis to engage in suffering, at a minimum, aided by our own ability to have control over how we could respond. Where I believe the Christian has an advantage in this is the understanding that what we have isn’t the foundation of our identity, but that our identity comes from the One guiding us through it.
A slight update on Turing’s Miscellany:
It’s done! but still rests in Greg’s capable (though perpetually under water) hands. As soon as I have an InDesign file, I will be able to get this off to print at IngramSpark and I can start work on a new book!
Happy Weekend Folks!
