Sad Sundays: Going to Church While Your Spouse Stays Home in Pain
Jeremy Wright
A friend sent me an encouraging text recently that caught me off guard with how well it captured my need in a way I couldn’t quite articulate myself.
“Was reading this today and thought of you…prayed for you…’These things I remember as I pour out my soul: how I used to go to the house of God under the protection of the Mighty One with shouts of joy and praise among the festive throng.’ Praying for a resurrection of this in the Wright family.”
A resurrection (pun intended, I think) of joy in God on Sundays. But hang on: pastors live for Sunday, right? Our week is planned around and builds to the crescendo of the church gathering. We put hours into planning music, liturgy, sermons, and making room for fellowship. Why would we need a resurrection of joy on Sundays?
In the hindsight of the last few years, it took me longer than it should have to come to the realization that being a pastor couldn’t fix my Sunday blues. I still loved (and love) worship, fellowship, singing, and communion. I still wanted (and want) those things to be a central part of my week and my Sunday, but the losses of chronic pain had accumulated over more than a half decade and I found myself admitting that Sunday was the saddest day of my week. The church hadn’t made my Sunday sad. The losses of chronic pain did. Leaving my wife at home week after week. Seeing the pain in my children as they loaded into the van wishing every seat was full. Watching them struggle to engage in singing because they missed sitting with mom and felt her absence in more acute ways when we settled in as the service started. The losses stacked up as I plodded ahead, doing what I’m sure was the right thing for our family, all while the snowball of grief and sadness rolled downhill growing larger and larger.
Chronic pain is a thief. It takes away things you love.
As I talk to other Christians walking with chronic pain the struggle of church usually surfaces pretty quickly in our conversation. The majority of the time the felt need isn’t a hurt the church is causing but a longing in the heart of the suffering person to be who they used to be in church life and to serve in the ways they used to serve. To go back to a less limited life remembering “how I used to go to the house of God under the protection of the Mighty One with shouts of joy and praises among the festive throng.” It is a longing to take back the life and experiences that the thief of chronic pain snuck in and stole.
The challenge for many of us is that this kind of restitution isn’t possible. Those memories of our past life will remain memories. Our future looks like it may hold even more less than ideal Sundays. So how do we go on with that kind of sadness? A few practices have been sustaining me.
(1) Recognize the losses and grieve them.
For the longest time I lived in a kind of stubbornness that refused to admit how hard things had gotten. Sticking to the normal rhythms and plodding along, I didn’t see how the challenges of a Sunday with chronic pain was casting a cloud that I couldn’t outpace. Over time I came to see that my ignorance (or avoidance) was short-circuiting my lament. I wasn’t able to bring my pain to God in honest confession and dependence because I wasn’t able to name it clearly. If I didn’t see my trials as a loss it made it that much harder to work through the grief they caused. Acknowledging the losses we experienced around Sundays helped me process the grief that we felt week after week. It gave me a language to understand the pain and a way to shape our prayer and the way we talk about our losses with others.
(2) Entrust your heart to safe caretakers
In addition to casting my cares of grief on the Lord because he cares for me, it helps me to bear my heart with safe friends who are glad to hear and help carry my burden. We know that we aren’t made to experience sadness in isolation, but the unique burdens of life with chronic pain and illness can make it difficult to invite others into our world, especially if we’ve been hurt by lost friendships, bad advice, or left feeling like an inconvenience in the past. Our life can feel heavy. Our burden can feel like a bit too much for someone else to bear. Yet in God’s kindness he often sends other sufferers to come alongside us as a safe outlet. Those relationships have proven invaluable to us as we navigate the challenges of sad Sundays.
(3) Go to church or stay home to the glory of God
Should I be going anyway, even if it’s excruciating and takes days to recover? Am I disobedient for missing another Sunday? Am I disappointing the people that love me and want me there? Am I really just motivated by a desire to prove my strength or is my longing sincere?
Life with chronic pain doesn’t come with a one-size fits all manual. Some people with similar conditions may not experience the same struggles that you do on Sundays. Others may have it worse. In every case there is a dance between our desires and convictions about the good of the church gathering and the cold hard reality of our bodies ability and limits on the first day of the week.
It has been helpful for us to acknowledge our desires and yet still listen to our limits. Yes, we’d like to glorify God among his people all together as a family. But today our limits say that it would be unwise, so we’ll listen and adapt. All of us need wisdom to bring convictions to bear on our limitations. Those limits are oftentimes hard to hear and painful to heed, but the Lord is no less pleased with us if we’re present with the church or regretfully at home. He comforts us in all our affliction (2 Cor 1:3-4) and sadness as we live in the less ideal realities of chronic pain on Sundays.
Sad Sundays might be an inescapable reality of your bodily or family limits, but at the end of the day we remember that it is still Sunday. Still resurrection day. A day of building hope in a new creation promises while groaning in old creation bodies. It may not look like we want it to, but one day it will. It may be sad for a while, but one day our faith will be sight and we’ll all be together in new creation bodies. Come quickly, Lord Jesus.