A couple of years ago, my sister posted an image of one of
her favorite paintings to her Facebook page with a comment about how it had
always stirred something deep inside of her.
I’d never seen it before, but I identified with my sister’s sentiments from
the moment I saw it sailing through my newsfeed.
The main subject of the art piece—a woman—was viewed from
behind in the foreground, with dark wisps of hair escaping from her bun in the
breeze. She was in a long, desolate
field of yellowing grass, sort of half-lying on the ground in a pastel pink,
short-sleeved dress and casual, gray shoes.
Pushing herself up off the earth with a set of bone-thin arms, twisting
her torso away from her lounging lower body, she looked like some kind of land-bound
mermaid. The fingers of one pressed-down
palm seemed to be reaching out towards the top left corner of the scene, where a
large, shaded house stood starkly against a clouded horizon.
The painting was Christina’s
World, by Andrew Wyeth—one of the most popular American paintings of the
mid-twentieth century. It depicted a woman
Wyeth had known in real-life who’d been paralyzed from the waist down due to
polio. He’d been inspired to create the
painting as he’d watched her out the window of his summer home one day, dragging
her own limp limbs across the field. [1]
Curious to know more about how that mournful masterpiece had
made my sister feel, I asked her.
She responded by saying it made her feel sad, because Wyeth’s rendering
gave the impression that the woman was alone, with no one to help her home.
I agreed, feeling a mixture of pity and despair whenever I
viewed the scene. It seemed the woman
was so close, and yet so far from where she wanted to be.
It reminded me of another piece of artwork I’d had the honor
of beholding, but this one wasn’t a painting.
It was a video I’d watched at a church service about seven years ago. Using home video clips, photos, background music,
and subtitles, the video, entitled Together,
told the story of a father and son who’d competed as a team in over a thousand
marathons, duathlons, and triathlons. Setting
them apart from most other family racing partnerships, however, was the fact
that the son had been severely physically disabled.
Due to a lack of sufficient oxygen during his birth, the son,
Rick Hoyt, had been diagnosed as a spastic quadriplegic with cerebral palsy,
unable to speak or walk. He’d learned to
communicate with the use of an interactive computer as a boy and expressed to
his father, Dick, that he wanted to participate in a five-mile benefit run when
he was fifteen years old. Although Dick
had never considered himself a runner, he agreed to make his son’s request a
reality by pushing his wheelchair in the race.
Afterwards, Rick told his father that the experience had taken away his
feeling of being disabled, and the rest was history.[2]
I remember sitting there in a chair by myself near the aisle
when the video ended, tracing my fingers below my lower lids to keep my eye
makeup from smearing. My husband had
been working nights at the time and was sleeping during the day, so I’d gone to
the service alone. When I returned to
our quiet apartment, the late morning sunshine streaming in through our glass
balcony door onto our carpet, the tears were still brimming. I could not get the video out of my head—the
muscles in Dick’s calves as he pounded the pavement behind Rick’s running chair,
Dick cutting through the water in a freestyle stroke as he pulled Rick behind
him in a boat, Rick’s arms stretched out wide as they raced through walls of
cheering onlookers, and finally, Rick’s smiling, adoring face tilted back towards
his dad as they approached the finish line as a team.
I felt an overwhelming sense of quiet desperation—a longing—as
I replayed the scenes in my head. Dick,
who had not been a natural distance runner, had more than likely counted the
cost of his commitment before jumping in, knowing it would be great, just as
Jesus had anticipated the agony of our atonement when He sweated drops of blood
on the Mount of Olives and prayed, “Father, if you are willing,
take this cup from me; yet not my will, but yours be done” (Luke 22:42). Both knew what they were getting into ahead
of time—the weight they’d have to carry—and still they considered it worthwhile
because of what it meant for others.
I think that’s where my desperation came from—from getting
just a glimpse of the suffering involved in their sacrifices and wanting to see
it stop, but understanding that they had made their choices, and that they had
chosen well.
It seemed Rick must’ve felt something similar, saying that
if he was given the opportunity to give his father any one thing, it would be “for
my dad to sit in the chair and I would push him for once."[2]
Even with my awareness of all the various the wheels turning
in my soul in correlation with their touching story, I sensed there was still
something I wasn’t totally grasping—something that was rippling even deeper than
my heart and mind could reach.
Sitting down inside the patch of sunlight on the living room
floor, I called my step-dad and mentor, Terry, to see if he could help me sort
it out.
I couldn’t get through my summary of the film without breaking
down and crying repeatedly. When I finally
finished, blowing my nose into a crumpled clump of toilet paper, my patient
step-dad’s advice was simple: ask
God.
I did, over and over again for the next several years, but
it wasn’t until I saw my sister’s posting of Christina’s World that it finally clicked: I’d been able to recognize the father in the
video as being representative of both Jesus Christ and my Heavenly Father, but
I’d failed to see how the man in the wheelchair could fully symbolize me.
Sure, I could relate with Rick in the sense that I was a
child of God, just as he was a child of his father, and I got that I, too, needed
my Father’s help to run this race called life and to cross the finish line into
His Kingdom at the end of it, but I couldn’t get past the fact that he was physically
disabled.
It was ironic. Rick
and Dick hadn’t allowed his Rick’s impairments to be an obstacle to their
dreams, but I’d allowed them to hinder my understanding. And, as awful as that sounds, it made
sense. How could I have empathized with his
situation when I’d never experienced anything that even came close to comparing?
But I had, and it took the woman in the painting for me to
see it. I’m not sure why it took her and
not Rick—perhaps it was simply because she was female—but in any case, I saw
it.
She was me. Rick was
me. I was them. Stripped of support and on my own, I was
them. It wasn’t just “Christina’s
world”—it was mine, too. And even worse
than being paralyzed, I was dead. It was
only through the death and resurrection of my Savior—my hero—Jesus Christ, that
I was able to stand, that I was able to be someone new—to run and play and speak
and see and hear and touch and taste and smell.
In Acts 17:28, Paul said that “in Him we
live and move and have our being,” and in John 15:5, Jesus said, “Apart from me
you can do nothing.” It was true then,
and it still is. Though I may deceive
myself into thinking that it’s not, it still is.
Just as it was for the sick man waiting on
the edge of the healing pool of Bethesda—another land-bound merperson—with no
one to help him in (John 5), for the two blind men screaming out to Jesus on
the roadside when the passing crowd commanded them to be quiet (Matthew 20), for
the paralyzed man who couldn’t be brought into the house where Jesus was,
because it was too full (Luke 5), and for Lazarus lying at the rich man’s gate,
full of sores and begging for crumbs (Luke 16), as well as for so many others.
They were all so close, and yet so far—tales
of tragedy, just like the man in the video and girl in the painting—but Christ
closed the gap for them, paving the way for them to make it home, to finish the
race. It happened for the first four men
during life and for Lazarus after death.
Paul said in Acts 17:27 that God is not far
from any one of us—that He’s waiting for us to reach out for Him and find Him,
which means it doesn’t have to be a continued case of “so close, and yet
so far” for anyone anymore. We don’t
have to go it alone—there is hope. And
I’m so thankful for that.
Welcome to my world.
1. “Christina’sWorld,” Wikipedia, last modified
February 20, 2014.
2. TeamHoyt.com;
“About Team Hoyt,” The Hoyt Foundation, Sandra Wilcox, accessed March 3, 2014.
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