Rosie the Riveter, Home Built Sewers, and the Holy "I Can't"

I can't. Do you say those words often? I don't. Like, never. “Yes, I can” runs in my veins like iron runs through our well water. I would have made a great Rosie the Riveter.

Not only don't I ever say “I can't,” but if someone says it to me (as in, “you can't do that”), well, that's probably the best motivation to ensure I will try.

I think this is a result of being the daughter of a man who built his own garage and laid his own septic tank. (That last one at night, on account of the law frowns on home built septics, apparently.) My dad repaired washers and dryers for a living. He didn't exactly have a degree from the Ty Pennington School of Demolition and Carpentry. He just never knew he couldn't do things, so he did them.

This stubborn inheritance may be part of the reason why, just prior to getting sick last June, my calendar included five speaking engagements, one vacation for five, a writer's conference, a pastor's conference, two kids' graduations, a weekend road trip, normal work, a wedding . . . and a partridge in a pear tree. I'm certain there was no connection between that and the getting sick thing. None whatsoever.

All this to say—I've been saying “I can't” a lot the last five months. And I've hated it.

I can't commit to a mission trip. I can't take a walk around the lake. I can't promise I'll make a two-hour drive. I can't sit up at the table to play a board game. I can't sign on to help promote your book. I can't even get off the stupid couch to turn off the TV. Yes, it's been that bad. Friends I've wanted to support haven't been supported by me. Kids I've wanted to spend time with have had to do their things without me. And I've rebelled against the I cant's. Oh, how I have rebelled. Inwardly, because it's tough to rebel too strenuously when “I can't get off the couch” is the one “I can't” that's absolutely incontrovertible.

I've never known the complete, frustrated helplessness that is physical disability, nor the depth to which it can affect your outlook. (Not to mention your disposition. Those people who suffer sweetly through illness? Yeah, so not me. I'm a certified crank. True story.)

I knew I hated hearing “you can't,” but I never knew how deeply I would despise saying “I can't,” knowing it to be true, and feeling the fear of not knowing when it would not be.

“I can't” are two little words, containing an ocean of meaning, complexity, and emotion I never realized. I rebel at their truth. I don't think I'm the only one.

In fact, I know I'm not, because that little incident in the Genesis Garden happened when two people looked at one another and thought, “Did He really say we can't? I don't like that.” And we all know how that ended.

No, being forced into I can't because of physical limitations and fighting the limitations God created are not the same thing. But the former only exists because the latter occurred. On some level, the “I cant's” we hate are all a result of the “I won't” chosen so long ago.

All this time, I've been trying to figure out what I can learn from the past five months, and maybe it's simpler than I'm making it. Maybe, it's that discontent with the results of that one big, disastrous “I will” is OK. Not just OK, but encouraging. A sign of life. A proof that we know in our being this is not how it was meant to play out.

Maybe it's OK to hate our I cant's. Maybe they're a reflection of our restlessness with the way things are versus the way they should be. We know we were not made for sickness and disability and frustration. We know the world was not created for hunger and cruelty and greed. One huge cry of frustration at our “I cant's” really may be a healthy cry. A cry of birth, signaling our anger at not being able to heal the ills around us.

And after the angry cry of birth comes the living. The refusal to give in to the cant's and the agreement that whatever we can matters.

I know someone with a chronic illness who so often can't. Yet when she can, she fights human trafficking with every ounce of her passion. Are the two connected? Does her frustration at physical difficulty interplay with the willingness to fight against an evil the world was not meant to hold? Oh, I think it does.

I think our real limits can always fuel our discontent with unjust limits. It should not surprise us, really.

CS Lewis felt and explained our discontent often.

“The sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing — to reach the Mountain, to find the place where all the beauty came from — my country, the place where I ought to have been born. Do you think it all meant nothing, all the longing? The longing for home? For indeed it now feels not like going, but like going back.” 

Unlike my friend, I am going to get better. This will be over, and I'll be back to being my contrary active self. But when “Yes I can” is back, I hope it fuels a different sort of discontent. One not so much focused on me but on fixing what has been broken and retrieving what has been lost.

What have you discovered through your “I cant's”?