The Space Between Heartbeats
Choosing to Stay: Faith, Affliction, and the Space Between
I was planning to share a post about Christmas. But this year, Christmas has felt….complicated. Illness has a way of tinting everything it touches, even the season that is supposed to feel bright. So instead of writing what I intended, I’m writing what is real.
In one of my favorite books, the main character is lying on his deathbed and describes longing for the space between heartbeats, because every beat brings pain. Not death exactly, just the pause. The small mercy between moments. That image has lived with me for years, and lately it has come back with force.
That is how my body feels now. Every heartbeat is work. Every breath is negotiated. I find myself longing for the spaces in between, not necessarily because I want to leave,but because those spaces do not hurt.
When I first became sick, almost twenty years ago, I had a dream. I was standing in my kitchen, and the Lord was there. Then the adversary, dressed in black, came up behind me, knocked me down, slipped his arms under mine, and began dragging me toward the front door.
Jesus stood over me and told me plainly that the devil wanted to take me out. Without words, I understood that I had to fight with everything I had. I also understood that the threshold mattered. If I crossed it, something would be lost. I was weak, and he was moving fast. I woke up before I reached the door, but I woke with an unmistakable knowing. My health would test me to the point of having to consciously choose to live.
At the time, I didn't know what that would mean. I only knew that staying would not be passive.
Why I have been quiet about my illness
I haven't shared the details of my illness with many people over the years. Part of that is embarrassment. Part of it is the fear of looking weak. There's also a spiritual hesitation that is harder to explain, the sense that talking too openly somehow binds God, as if visibility creates expectation, and expectation turns faith into a transaction.
That sounds silly when said out loud, because God is not bound by our ideas. Still, pain makes theologians of us all. You learn quickly how easily suffering gets misinterpreted. People mean well, but they rush to fix. They bring certainty. They bring a plan. Sometimes they bring a subtle accusation, even if they don't intend to..
Also, I have tried so many things and spent staggering amounts of money chasing answers. Specialists. Tests. Diets. Promised breakthroughs that did not come. There is a particular fatigue that comes from being told the next idea will be the one, when you are carrying a private list of things that already failed.
So silence became a form of protection. Not denial or shame alone. Protection from bad theology, and from relentless fixing.
What constant pain looks like
The truth is that this illness is difficult in ways that are hard to convey without sounding dramatic. The pain is unrelenting, twenty four hours a day, seven days a week, with no true pause, no baseline of relief, only variations in intensity from grinding ache to white hot searing that feels like live wires threaded through bone and nerve.
If I compare it to my body twenty years ago, before all this began, I would have needed heavy medication just to function at all. Now this is simply my normal, a constant companion that erodes everything else, turning every breath, every swallow, every expression into a negotiation with agony that never fully recedes.
The moral weight of pain management
Doctors have offered opiates more than once. I have always said no. Out of my mother’s ten children, three became addicted to prescription pain medication, and when that became too expensive, they turned to heroin. I watched that story unfold in real time. I saw what it cost them.
Turning down those prescriptions was not an abstract moral choice. It was survival informed by memory. There have been moments, in the worst of the pain, when I wished I'd chosen different. Then the fear pulls me back. Addiction is not a road I'm willing to walk, even when pain tempts me to reconsider.
Over time I learned the hard way that over the counter pain medicine was destroying my gut. Then came severe digestive issues, food restrictions, and fear. Eating became fraught with anxiety! I have sat in front of plates of food negotiating with my body, knowing that nourishment might also mean suffering.
The prayer to leave, and the choice to stay
Once, during a particularly severe flare, I prayed and asked the Lord to take me. I knew He could. I was that sick. The answer I received was not rebuke. It was clarity. I was told that He would take me, but that I still had things I had agreed to do in this life, and that I would be deeply disappointed in myself if I left too soon.
I agreed to stay, with the understanding that when my work was done, I would not be asked to linger. That moment has returned to me more than once over the years, always as a reminder.
Mercy, not spectacle
There have also been moments of mercy. Not explanations. Not fixes. But companionship.
Once, during a brutal bout, I was in despair and cried out to the Lord with everything I had left. In response, I was shown a vision. I saw what looked like a music player, and He said to me, “This contains the soundtrack of your life. I’m dedicating this song to you.” Then He pressed play.
The hymn How Firm a Foundation began to play, and I was immediately filled with comfort. I was impressed to carry one line with me, and to remember it in difficult times:
As thy days may demand, so thy succor shall be.
That promise did not remove the pain, but it steadied me inside it. It reminded me that provision isn't always relief. Sometimes it's strength that arrives exactly equal to the day’s demand.
Another time, I was very near death. I won't share all the details, but I knew I could not do it alone anymore. My husband had been caring for me by himself, and I felt he needed help. I prayed that someone with faith would come and give me a blessing.
This happened while we were living at the Rock, and to this day neither my husband nor I know how it unfolded the way it did. Before I left for the hospital, one woman came into the room. I remember thinking, this is an answer to prayer. Then another woman came. Then another. And another. Until the entire room was filled with women, surrounding me, praying and blessing me.
That was one of the moments where it felt like it would take almost no effort to leave my body. The peace that came after those women ministered to me is difficult to describe. It was not dramatic. It was deep. It anchored me. I stayed.
There was another night when I was lying in bed, crying over how hard all of this had become. I felt stripped down to endurance, wondering if I was still remembered at all. Pain has a way of narrowing your world until even God feels distant. I finally asked aloud, “Do you even remember that I’m here, suffering?”
In response, I heard or felt a voice. It felt like a woman’s voice, though I can't explain why. It said, “You are favored. You just don’t remember.”
On the surface, those words don't sound comforting. But the feeling that came with them was. I felt known. Acknowledged. Loved. As if my story had not been lost, even when I could no longer see its shape.
Signs follow faith
One of the reasons Denver’s talk Signs Follow Faith landed so deeply for me is that it refuses a cruel equation many of us have absorbed, that healing equals faith, and unhealed bodies equal spiritual failure.
He points to wisdom literature, to Job, and to Nephi’s observation that a person can have “many afflictions” and still be “highly favored of the Lord.” He teaches that trusting God does not remove trials, and that faith is proven inside affliction, not by its absence.
That matters to me, because there is a false spirit that turns suffering into an accusation. It whispers that you're failing, that you're unseen, that you did not do enough. It invites other people to make themselves judges, as if they can interpret your body better than God can.
I have learned something slowly, and not gently. Signs follow faith. They do not precede it. They are given by God’s will, not demanded by ours. Healing can be a gift. So can explanation. So can restraint. So can the strength to remain when leaving would be so much easier.
What I have been told, and what I do not yet understand
There is one more piece I want to share carefully.
Over the years, I have received three separate blessings, given by different people, at different times, none of whom knew what the others had said. In all three, I was told the same thing, that once I had learned the lessons the Lord had for me to learn, I would be healed.
I don't know what to make of that. I don't know what the lessons are, or even if I'm meant to recognize them as lessons in the way we usually mean that word. I only know that this has not been a straight line, and whatever learning is happening has taken place inside pain, not after it.
I sometimes joke that I must be a slow learner, but I don't say that as accusation. If anything, this has taught me how careful we should be with other people’s timelines. God is not rushed. And whatever healing means in the end, I trust that it will not come by coercion, comparison, or shame.
For now, I live inside the faith that does not demand outcomes, only presence.
Choosing to stay
This most recent flare up has tested me in ways I had forgotten were possible. There have been moments where the pain is so constant that I feel how little effort it would take to slip away. Not in despair exactly, but in utter exhaustion. As if the door is always slightly ajar.
In those moments, I think again of that image, the longing for the space between heartbeats. I find myself slowing my breathing, lingering in the pause, gathering myself, choosing again.
I stay for my husband, who once asked me to hold on until our youngest was grown. I stay for my children. I stay now for my grandchildren, because I want to see who they become. I stay because staying itself has become holy work.
What this kind of faith is not
This is not triumphal. It is not performative. It is not an invitation to advise me, diagnose me, or fix me. It is not a contest to see who can explain suffering best.
It is simply a witness.
Closing
I don't tell this story to be corrected, admired, or measured. I tell it because I am done letting false narratives speak for me. Pain is not weakness. Endurance is not a consolation prize. Sometimes faith looks like miracles. Sometimes it looks like consent.
Sometimes it looks like choosing, over and over again, to remain embodied when every nerve argues otherwise.
If there is a sign in my life, it is this.
I am still here.
My sweet sister-in-law printed a quote for me. I didn't learn until years later that she had spliced together different lines from Job. I meditated on it over and over and still find it so comforting I wanted to share it.
“I was at ease, but He shattered me; He seized me by the neck and crushed me. He has set me up as His target; Yet He knows the way I have taken; when He has tested me, I will come forth as gold.”
It gave language to the paradox I could not explain, that life can feel like being struck, yet still be held, seen, and known.
[If you are living with chronic illness or relentless pain, I am not here to give you answers. I am here to say you are not invisible.]
Oh Kim, I love you ❤️
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