Reflections on Connection-Centered Leadership - Issue No. 22: The Suffering Gap

Photo Credit: Darin Swonger; Pictured: Darin Swonger, Melissa Swonger, and Remi

Last week, I hiked five miles. Five miles? That doesn't usually qualify for cue-the-confetti moments. Nothing to the person who hikes regularly. Nothing to the person who summits. BUT, for the person who asked a year ago if I'd ever hike again, yeah, cue the confetti.

This was a really tame hike. Only meandering through trees on a path qualified it as such. Perfect to start out and begin again...again. About four miles into the hike, I discovered that my husband had neglected to share a rather important detail. The last mile was uphill.

We've been together 30 years. He's my hiking buddy and my encourager. He questioned me when I started out. Did I really want to do this? Am I sure? Well, I didn't know I'd be hiking that day. I didn't plan or even set out to do it as a milestone. But I am someone who believes that random moments can turn into THE moment.

Sometimes you get a feeling, and all things are system go. We can override that moment with reason, or we can embrace the moment and go for it. It may not even seem monumental in reality, but your spirit knows it's a pivotal moment. Fear and what-ifs can hold us back. The arguments they make seem so reasonable. But everything I want is on the other side of a fear-based decision.

Fifteen years ago, I rewrote the map of what is physically possible in my mind. After a freak accident left me in a wheelchair and doctors questioned whether I would ever walk independently again, I spent four years relearning how to walk. Eventually, I ran. Eventually, I summited mountains.

Last year, after breaking my back in two places, sustaining a pelvic avulsion fracture, and completely severing hamstring tendons in my left leg, I found myself asking a familiar question:

Would I ever hike again?

No one knew.

The tendons couldn't be reattached. My mechanics would be different. The answer wasn't something anyone could predict. It would be discovered over time.

As I walked that trail last week, I could feel how much adaptation had taken place. My lower back and outer glutes have spent the last year learning to compensate for muscles that no longer function the way they once did. The movement wasn't smooth. It wasn't efficient. It certainly wasn't the same.

But somewhere around the second mile, I stopped thinking about whether I could do it. For the better part of a year, I had wondered whether I would ever hike again. As I climbed that final mile, I realized I wasn't asking that question anymore. The trail had already answered it.

As I started up the incline, a scene from Facing the Giants came to mind. When Brock is doing the death crawl and tells Coach Taylor, "I'm 'bout outta strength." The coach responds, "Then you negotiate with your body for more strength. But don't you give up."

He was blindfolded. I laughed. Had I known at the beginning that the final mile was uphill, I might have convinced myself I couldn't do it. I had plenty of tangible evidence to bolster that claim. But, then again...

As a child with an ongoing illness, I didn't run until I was nineteen. What should have felt familiar felt entirely new. Years later, after spending four years in a wheelchair, I had to learn how to walk again. Last week, I realized hiking belongs on that list, too.

The real question wasn't whether I could hike. It was whether I would go through the frustration of adaptation to develop a new way.

Everything costs something. What my husband and I call "The Suffering Gap" keeps many people from trying. If we believe we should never experience pain, discomfort, frustration, or failure, then we will avoid many of the very things that lead to growth.

It was exhilarating to realize I could do it. I knew I would eventually make it one way or another. But it was physically painful. The emotional and spiritual triumph didn't erase my body's pain. It simply gave the pain context and meaning.

For days, I hurt. I still do.

The hike reminded me that adaptation always asks something of us. There is a cost to learning a new way forward. There is a cost to beginning again. There is a cost to rebuilding after loss. But there is also a cost to refusing the journey.

If we decide the frustration of adaptation is too high, we often stay exactly where we are. Over time, avoidance becomes its own pathway. The things we repeatedly do, whether moving forward or standing still, become familiar. They become practiced. They become part of us.

Often, there's no going back to the way things were. 

Living things change and grow. Otherwise, we stagnate and die, literally or figuratively. Lament the loss of the story you thought you were writing, but only for a season. Give it an end date. Then, in an ordinary unplanned moment, embrace what is possible.

What I've learned, repeatedly, is that it's less about returning to who we were than it is about learning how to move forward. We release what we're holding onto so we can receive what God has for us.

Running didn't look the way I imagined it would when I was a child watching from the sidelines. Walking didn't look the way it once had after four years in a wheelchair. And hiking doesn't look the way it did before the accident.

Yet each time, something meaningful was waiting on the other side of adaptation, not because the circumstances changed, but because I did.

The trail itself wasn't new. The trees weren't new. The hill wasn't new. What was new was the person walking it.

The questions I'm sitting with this week are these:

What are you still holding onto that you need to release so you can receive what God has for you?

Is there an area of lament whose season needs to end so that you can embrace a new chapter?

And finally, is fear holding you back from achieving what you desire?