Fruit of Affliction.

For each new year, every person has a special request to God. Some admit it, some don’t. For some, it is called a resolution, for others, a vision. I called mine a prayer. A simple request, a wish-note sent to God.

Some wish for peace or happiness; others for a better job, relationships, health. Mine was equally vague, but just as earnest. I asked for fruifulness and humilty. And fruitfulness and humility God has given, gave, and will continue to give.

I asked for it. Unknowingly, unwittingly, I asked for it.

I have been reading lately. I read a book called The Hidden Smile of God, about the fruit of human affliction; and re-read another, a book a friend gave me last year about living a fruitful life in God. In between the turning of the pages God whispered to me, that all this has a reason. This this, has a reason. This taking away of everything that means anything to me- Rainbow, family, relationships, my grades, trophies, projects, Anorexia, self-worth, pride, self-control, power- has a grander purpose, and that really, I asked for it.

I asked for it. Fruitfulness and humilty.

Fruitfulness to serve and love people, to be a blessing to people around me, and humility to understand the meaning of being unseen, small and grounded. This, this This, is part of what it is- I asked for it. Fruitfulness means bearing good fruit, fruit that blesses, fills, nourishes people. Humility means being grounded and content in smallness, and letting God be Big God.

Unconsciously, I have been so proud. Proud of helping people, proud of Kitesong, proud of this space, proud of my dreams, my self-righteousness, of what Rainbow could be, what I am in the eyes of this world. I forgot how wildly theatrical God can be, how utterly unpredicatable. God keeps us off-balance, keeps us constantly surprised with unimaginable twists to the plot.

I planned and strived and set out with Rainbow– We think we know how to do something big, and God makes it small. I didn’t think anyone would pay attention to an 18 year-old battling with clinical depression with a story about kites- We think that everything we have is weak and shameful, and God makes it big and beautiful.

A wild theatric, God is. I forgot. He twists the plot.

Indeed, I asked for it. I asked to learn humility, and this is how God has chosen to teach me. Do whatever it takes God, I remember praying, over and over.

I asked for greater fruitfulness, and this is how God has chosen to prune me. Pruning means to take a pair of garden scissors to snip away at the branches which do not produce good fruit. “He cuts off every branch in me that bears no fruit, while every branch that does bear fruit He prunes so that it will be even more fruitful.”- John 15:2. How the bible speaks right to you sometimes.

Scissors hurt. This darkness in not understanding anything about anything… hurts. You feel so small, so… humbled. The books write- that all pain from God has a purpose. “For some reason,” said a horticulturalist, “the trees bear better fruit when slashed and wounded in this way. So we slash their trunks and barks into added fruitfulness, to produce bigger and finer apples.” –The Divine Gardener by Selwyn Hughes.

I am slashed. Every day, I am fighting something I do not even like to call by its name. I am wounded. Every day, my pride is gloriously ruined by the knowledge of being in therapy, a massive work-in-progress. You can never treat or look at people the same way again when you yourself are in such a low place underneath a makeshift roof of stigma. There is a profound humility gained only by being in such a vulnerable position. Every day, I am being slashed and wounded.

It is cold here. I don’t understand this sense of loss, confusion and fear, of both past and present, bearing down on me. I don’t understand exactly what this darkness is, this frequent stoic numbness in the mornings, and intermittent prosaic deadness through the day- whether to believe them who say it is a real medical illness and not my fault, a legitimate reason to get help for, and “not something you can just relax and snap out of” because it is a medical condition linked to chemicals and hormones and genes, or to believe the stigma, believe my pride that I can mentally will myself out of this, that I don’t need anybody to tell me about support groups, or medication or therapy or appointments or what to do for that matter.

“You look like you’re not open to medication now ya?”

“You’re right, I’m not, Dr Lee-the last time it was much, much worse. This is bearable- I think I can hang on.”

“Okay. Hang in there and we’ll see how things go till the next appointment.”

I’ve too much pride to admit that it may be an illness, and too much pride to admit that it may not be, that it is just a rough time, and I have had difficulty coping.

Both conditions are highly misunderstood- depression and anorexia. We think that people who get these illnesses are illogical, dense, pessimistic or paranoid. Sometimes I think that too. We just don’t get it, sometimes even I don’t- that these are conditions which need medical and professional treatment. Why do I catch myself surprised when they tell me that depression was not and is not my fault? I find myself asking immediately-you mean it isn’t? You mean it doesn’t mean that I’m made of cotton wool, that I can stop feeling condemned about this? Why did I need someone to tell me I needed to get professional help for Anorexia, that self-therapy just isn’t enough? I catch myself thinking-I can do this myself right- look at the progress I’ve made so far- all by myself!

There is so much stigma I even have to battle my own. What is this that I have. Is it anything at all.

It is profoundly humbling. To be in a place called Vulnerable.

It is cold here. It is snowed in. I am buried deep down, suffocated under, with the howling winds and stinging cold up above. It is cold here, where I am. And there is darkness, utter darkness here, and up above. But even as I wait, stung by the pelting winds, I hear the distant song of warmth and know the winter will not last forever.

I am slashed by circumstance, loss, confusion and illness, wounded by stigma, people’s judgement and opinion of where I am at this point in time. You start to know who your friends are in times like these.

It is cold here. It is snowed in. I am slashed and wounded. “For some reason,” said a horticulturalist, “the trees bear better fruit when slashed and wounded in this way. So we slash their trunks and barks into added fruitfulness, to produce bigger and finer apples.”

It was my wish-note and God has answered. Fruitfulness and humility. Believing in God doesn’t mean a ticket out of suffering. But it means that all suffering is not in vain, all suffering is part of a Big plan I cannot fathom, all affliction is part of producing the fruit of humility, and the fruit that blesses, nourishes, fills people- not with my own striving or my own pride, but by the theatrical way that Big God works, and how He makes everything come full circle, eventually.

Maybe someday, like Leonardo said, I’ll be that kind of special doctor because of what God has put me through. Maybe someday all this will turn out for good. Perhaps not in the way I wished for Rainbow to be, not the way I wished myself to turn out to be- but leaving room for what God has purposed. Even though I don’t know what, and I cannot understand it now.

“You make it seem like your faith is all about your effort, Wai Jia,” a close friend told me gently and lovingly yesterday, “… the way you’re so hard on yourself for thinking you didn’t do something right, or didn’t love God enough… But it isn’t about that at all. It’s not about your great faith in God, my dear. It’s about your little faith, small as a mustard seed, in a great, big God. He’ll see you through. “

It is cold here. I am afraid too. I don’t know what to expect, and I don’t know how to deal with all this at once.

But I know one thing, that “God disciplines us for our good… No discipline seems pleasant at the time, but painful. Later on, however, it produces a harvest of righteousness and peace for those who have been trained by it.” -Hebrews 12: 7- 11

A harvest. A harvest means fruit, lots of good and tasty fruit. Discipline, this is what it is. A pruning process.

All this has a reason. If anything, I ought to thank God for answering my prayer, my little wish-note, because I’ll have to believe, that the sweetest kind of fruit is that produced by affliction.

Where there is winter, a spring harvest awaits too.