WLSU: In My Bones

We all understand bones in terms of the stability and structure they bring to our bodies. So, at first for me it was counterintuitive to hear that part of their healthy process was that they were breaking down all the time. For most of my life, I have associated stability and structure with something like immobility. You want your house built on a strong foundation. And we often find great comfort in the idea of changelessness, of things remaining the same. When life deviates from our expectations, we seek to get back to normal, to something that resembles stasis because that feels safe. As the old hymn proclaims, “Like a tree planted by the water, I shall not be moved.”

But it turns out I’m moving all the time. These little invisible things within my very body are moving, tearing my foundation down and building it back up again all day every day. These strong bones are anything but static and immovable, and my desire to understand that has helped me learn to accept that change is inevitable.

I know I know. People have said change is inevitable for years. I’ve said it plenty of times. That doesn’t mean I always believe it. After all, change is scary. Even when I don’t like the way things are, I resist change because at least I know what I’m getting now. And even though I acknowledge that change is inevitable, I often silently add the word “unfortunately”. When it comes to my bones, what shocks me is not simply that change is inevitable – it’s that the kind of change my bones undergo contributes to their strength and stability, rather than undermining them.

What would happen to my approach to change if I understood it not as an occasional inconvenient event, but as something that is happening every moment, relentlessly and eternally? Last summer my friend and I were sitting on these large rocks on the coast of Maine, and I naively commented how I couldn’t even fathom what it took to shape and move these rocks all those billions of years ago. Without hesitation, my friend replied, “It might help you to realize that whatever it was that did it, it’s happening right now, is still happening, it never stopped happening.” That did help.

If I’m going to have an honest relationship with change, I may as well begin by accepting that change is ongoing, relentless, eternal.

I’ve talked a lot about conversion or transformation recently. It’s worth noting that conversion and transformation are synonyms for change. I’ve been wrestling with the idea that my conversion was not an event from my distant past, but is an ongoing reality in the present tense. It would seem that my very bones testify to this reality.

There is something tempting about placing my conversion in the past. Conversion, transformation, change, even when it’s beautiful, is scary and uncertain. So, if I say I was converted all those years ago, I get to be static and safe from change. I can stick to the narrative that I used to be one way, and then I had a big change and now I’m like this. God did something in my life a while ago and I was unsure of how that would go, but here I am all these years later and I’m ok. Safety. Stability. Unchanging.

But no. Change is constant. How could my own conversion be any different? The shaping of our lives in the image of the God of Love is endless. Eternal, even. And this is not unfortunate. It’s how we were made. We were made to be torn down and built back up.

I found out about osteoclasts and osteoblasts and bones when my father was diagnosed with Multiple Myeloma. This cancer starts in the bone marrow where your blood cells are being made. Your white blood cells mutate and those mutated cells start to reproduce at a terrible rate. This does a number of bad things to your body, one of which is that it ramps up production of those osteoclasts that are tearing your bones down, and they begin to work faster than the osteoblasts that are building new bone. My father’s cancer was discovered after some pain in his back and ribs turned out to be brittle bones that were breaking. The worst was the total collapse of several of his vertebrae. He was 5’9” his whole adult life. After a year with Multiple Myeloma he stood at 5’2”.

Doctors refer to the mutation of cells in this cancer as malignant transformation. Not all change, it turns out, is positive. Some transformation is healthy, and some of it is malignant.

When I divorce myself from the feelings I have about what Multiple Myeloma did to my Dad, I am able to learn so much about healthy change. The change within him was malignant because it interrupted the natural process of transformation for which his bones were made. They needed to tear down and build back up to be strong. They needed to be in that constant process in order to support his body. When they were kept from ongoing transformation, his bones became weak and brittle.

Consciously, I may resist and resent change. But on an atomic level, I’m made for it and so are you. I have no interest in converting you. I have a great interest in you understanding the conversion you are experiencing when you engage with God in this life. We are undergoing transformation – all of us every day. Ourselves, our souls and bodies, are not made to be static and immovable. We are bulit for love. We are built for conversion.