If you’ve been reading my recent posts, you would know about my current health crisis. I trust readers are adding me to their prayer list and I thank those of you for doing so. Come to think of it, I should add to my nightly list of people I pray for you readers of this blog especially those in a lot of need for prayers.
This post is about a new friend Bill Nott from Alaska. We’ve become acquainted through his new YouTube channel using his name, chronicling his own health journey of weight loss using a carnivore, low carb approach. He was kind enough to send me an edifying book about a Christian woman’s near death experience seeing Christ and heaven.
Bill has been bedridden due to his weight for four years essentially unable to leave his room or small house on family property in Alaska. He is a humble and kind man, walking his path with Christ. But I know his cross, his life, is a heavy burden.
There is a saying that “there is always someone suffering even more than you.” This is meant to give us courage and comfort that we are not alone with our crosses, that suffering is part of the human condition, and that God is helping us all through life. If Bill can humbly suffer with faith, hope, and love in his state of life, then I certainly can as well.
Bill is 700 pounds. It is very difficult for him to sit at the edge of his bed, to stand, or to walk just a few feet. He suffers from intense burning pain in his low back and knees. Most of the time he is alone in his room except for his cat, his best friend, and access to the world through his I-pad and TV. I can only imagine his daily routine of cooking, meals now eating 100% healthy food, exercise, networking his weight loss challenge channel online, reading, watching content, and praying.
All while constantly suffering. Fending off the evil spirit and the dark side of his own mind which we all have. Maintaining faith and hope with every conscious breath.
Christ visited people in medical conditions not dissimilar to this. Paralytics confined to bed. Lepers in pain removed from society. But it was a special bond he had with the terribly sick who sought His blessing believing he was the Messiah and Savior. There is a sweetness and even a blessing in suffering like this, in that it purified us making us even closer to God, with special unimaginably great rewards in heaven for ensuring great crosses now.
The Bible says “dust though art to dust though shalt return.” And the word humility comes from the Latin word “humus” meaning dirt or the Earth. In humility we are closest to the divine, so when God made us from the elements of the Earth in our innocence at birth, and calls us home to Him at death to return to the soil in burial, we are closest to Him compared to a state of earthly pleasure, ease, and comfort.
Suffering, especially like that of Bill, is a mystery in that we cannot usually understand the details how God is using it for our good and of the greater good, except that we know He in truth is.
Life is beautiful and worth living no matter how bad our situation may be, because it is the path to God and eternal life. So trying to be more healthy and overcome a state of sickness is part of that path as well, in which we can more deeply appreciate the gifts of life including health, mobility, physical ability, opportunities in the world, the ability to work, the ability to see and explore all that is beautiful in this world, however much you can knowing we all will have limits. Bill Nott is a testament to that truth, and I wish him even greater faith and hope and perseverance in carrying his own cross. And to eventually achieve his weight loss goal and the opportunities that will afford.