Abide in Me

I’m standing in the darkness; my forearms starting to burn with fatigue from gripping a doorknob for the last forty-five minutes, and Samantha is nowhere to be found. Make no mistake, there’s a child on the other side of the door, but it’s no longer the little girl I know. The illness that’s taken hold of her mind has stripped away so much of who she is. Her athleticism, brilliance, quick wit, and unending desire to take care of other people are gone. Any semblance of compassion, confidence, or affection has vanished, and what remains is a violent, terrified, incoherent creature whose feet and fists have been hammering at the walls and door of her room for what’s approaching an hour. Every few minutes, she’ll turn on her light; I’ll open the door to turn it off, forcefully put her back in bed, and then shut the door before she’s able to dash through it to escape. She shrieks with fury at this captivity, but since her mind can’t find words now, most of the sounds I hear are animalistic distortions of her normally sweet voice. Words can’t describe the pain I feel during this new nightly routine, but the memory of a recent night fills my mind in the midst of the shouting. We don’t have the kind of house where you’ll ever hear the words “wait until your dad gets home” as it relates to discipline. In fact, for one Mother’s Day in the past, I made Beth a wooden sign of her favorite Bible verse from Proverbs 23:13, “Do not withhold discipline from a child, for if you beat him with a rod, he will not die.” Needless to say, she can hold her own when it comes to handling the kids. While I go to great lengths to protect her from the emotional trauma of caring for Samantha when she’s in this state, Beth feels it’s her responsibility as a mother and the queen of our humble castle to take an active role in watching over her daughter. One night, when she insisted on waging the inevitable war of putting Sam to sleep, I left to work out and returned to a quiet house an hour and a half later, which I thought was a good sign. I made my way to our room and found Beth sitting on the bed with the left side of her face obscured by a hand resting along the underside of her jaw. I could see that she’d been crying, but when she turned to face me, I saw that one of her eyes wasn’t just red and puffy from tears; it was swollen and already growing black underneath. In a muffled voice, she told me that when she’d gone in to turn off the light for the twenty-fifth time that night and put Samantha back in bed in the darkness, Sam kicked violently, and her heel collided with Beth’s left jaw. When Beth gets hurt, she generally wants to be left alone, so it was a near-silent night until she fell asleep, and I went to play sentry, sleeping on my makeshift bed at the top of the stairs. It wasn’t until the next morning when she attempted to take a bite of breakfast that she heard an audible pop as her jaw slid back into alignment. Unbeknownst to me, Sam’s kick landed with enough force to shift Beth’s jaw out of place, but Beth didn’t want to upset me by sharing that minor detail. And I think I’m the tough one . . . I’m brought out of the memory and back into the present when I feel the full weight of Sam’s body slam into the door again. I hear her nails raking across it in a primal fashion before she retreats, only to careen into it again a few seconds later. With her first illness, I’d have grown increasingly enraged and concerned as the minutes dredged on, but I now try to guide my mind to a place where I can search for God’s presence. Like the night we spent in the emergency room in early January, my perspective of the circumstance changes; instead of seeing her battling me, I see myself battling Him. I hear and feel her through the door and think of all the times I’m overtaken by a vehemently rebellious spirit and lash out as He tries to contain me and prevent me from harming myself and those around me. In His compassion, He hems me in and waits for the flame of evil within me to burn out. If we search the Bible, illnesses of the mind were often attributed to demonic possession. Saul is seized by a harmful spirit in 1 Samuel 19 when he lashes out at David with inexplicable violence. In Matthew 9 and 12, we see men possessed by demons, whose sight and speech failed them. Mark 5 describes a man so overcome by unclean spirits that he walked for years through a graveyard he’d made his home. Because of the legion within him, he possessed such otherworldly strength that no chains could bind him; he cried out day and night and cut himself with stones until Jesus arrived and cleansed him. In reading about the disease the neurologists believe afflicts Samantha, some connections have been suggested between historical records of possessions and anti- NMDA autoimmune encephalitis. Changes in gait, the inability to speak, hallucinations, paranoia, irrational fears, uncanny strength, vocal distortions, and many other common threads exist. I’m not suggesting she’s been overtaken in that way; I don’t have the wisdom to discern between evil and illness. I only see how far she’s fallen from what she once was and wonder what the cause may be. I pray for Samantha to return to us and for a renewal of my patience as time crawls past. I pray for Beth to be willing to let me carry this weight so she doesn’t have to and for my son’s peace of mind as he hears his sister’s screams echo through the house. I try to pray loudly enough to drown out the sounds of this struggle and wait with hope for the tranquility of silence to fall over us all.