why loud bear?

Let’s not waste time here, you are being attacked by a bear. You have two appropriate responses. 

1. Play dead and let it pass

2. If you can’t escape it, fight back

Both sound like horrible options. If I could create an option 3 it would look more like:

3. Stay at home in jammies eating something crunchy and watching a Parenthood marathon on Netflix because the outside world is too dangerous.

But there he is and you can’t deny him. Less Saturday morning cartoon icon and more an upright, heaving buffalo. His size is fierce, he certainly does not want a hug. What now are you going to do? Your response hinges on his particular type, grizzly or black. 

Grizzly bear? Option 1. You lay there and pretend that he missed the party, another bear has done the job. Cover your neck, hide your face, and just give him enough time to leave. He is a transient issue, he will wreck shop and move on. The waiting is terrifyingly awful, but you know he is a passing train. So when you stand up in your soiled underwear and wipe off tears and mud, he will be gone. You may be changed forever, but there is nothing else he can do to you.

Black bear? Bless your heart. This is his turf and you are about to find out what you’re made of. He is here to stay, and you are having waves of regret for all of the undone cardio in your life. Take a look at option 2. Running is a joke that may land you (the memory of you) on a few major news stations. You have to fight back. Brother, sister, friend- draw from whatever well of gumption and grit that lives inside of you. If you’re lucky, you are in for a battle. Sometimes, you are here for a war. 

My bear is black and he was waiting on me in the delivery room of a Beaumont, Texas hospital in 1984. His timing was quite cruel, not even giving me the chance to learn that a season of life without bears was a possibility. If this analogy could serve me well, I would say we we started out the same size, both naively new to the world. 

When I arrived on the scene, I looked and smelled and seemed a healthy normal little gift to my mom and dad. Fingers and toes in place, I passed all of the first tests given to a fresh human, before I even knew how the pride that comes with passing something was supposed to feel. I was deemed a good egg, and sent home to no longer take up the pricey real estate of a sterile hospital room. Then my bear let out his first weak roar. I wasn’t keeping down any feedings. If you gave me food, I gave it back. After enough of these feedings, my parents picked up on the roar. Sometimes our ears block out what our hearts cannot handle. But the sound was loud enough and long enough, it couldn't be ignored.

My parents response to this beast of a situation looked like a major abdominal surgery on their 7 day old baby girl. The first of a list of surgeries I couldn’t even number on my perfectly formed fingers and toes, I was meeting the bear. His first name was long and hard to pronounce, but I heard it so often that by the time I learned how to write my own name, I could tell you that I had a disease called Chronic Intestinal Idiopathic Pseudo Obstruction. This particular brand of illness came with a lot of tubes and catheters, bags of nutrition to infuse and often enough hospitalizations. I wonder if not present when I first arrived, if maybe our paths had crossed much much later, that I would have been more afraid of him. Instead he seemed so tame, this sickly bear. His presence seemed as normal to me as walking or going to a movie or brushing my teeth. If Siegfried and Roy have taught us anything, it’s that a wild animal can only be tame until it isn’t. Circus Philosophy 101. It’s a bit of a waiting game, and while I was brushing my normal teeth and hooking up to my normal IV nutrition, I waited. Normal is such a sliding scale, much like wealthy or attractive or athletic or intelligent. It increases and decreases based on the level of those very things around you. So when I started school, normal changed. The pump that delivered a steady drip of calories into my bloodstream was past the toting limit for such a tiny girl, so I was allowed to push this pump and nutrition solution around in a baby stroller. There aren't too many bears visible at elementary school, at least not ones being pushed around in bright pink buggies. I love to look at pictures from that time because there was no shame on my cheeky kindergarten face, this was a brand new adventure for me, bear and all, I was so ready for the challenge. 

The gap between then and now takes up over 30 years and my bear is there when I wake up, and my bear is here as I type. The rest of the story will be filled in along the way, but I realize at some point we both got so used to each other that sometimes it is a challenge to hear anything but the sound of the roar. If I am not careful, it can be how I define myself, a way of not picking up on the symphony of sounds around me because this body is always louder. This pain is so, so loud.

Your bear might have a different name. He may be grizzly, hanging around long enough to do some damage, and then making his escape. Or, like mine, your bear may be black, lingering far past his welcome and showing no signs of retreat . Either way, he just showed up on the scene uninvited. He may have ravaged your kidneys or wrecked your bloodstream, he doesn’t seem to ask first. We shouldn’t be surprised when he shows his face, after all:

    In this world you will have trouble [bears], but take heart! I have overcome the world.

Jesus may not have leaned into the bear analogy, but his candor about the difficulty of being a human in the world was refreshingly honest. It gives us space to have an open dialogue about our struggles, a community of those who will walk with us in them, and a purpose that reaches beyond them. 

Loud bear is a place for people who are living life with a chronic illness, dealing with something that demands great inner strength. It is for those who are choosing to hear past the noise of a body that refuses to stick to the plan. There are no easy solutions here. We can only speak to what we ourselves have walked through. We can create a home for those who are looking for a resounding “me too,” a beautiful sound letting others know that they are not alone in this. I hope the words that land here are full of comfort and inject a little buoyancy into the weary spirit. May they give you courage enough to wake up one more day to fight your bear and to turn up the volume of the beautiful life that exists just underneath the roar. 

Lean in and listen.