More than a year ago, I found myself lying on the hardwood floor of my tiny studio apartment in Chicago. I had collapsed in fear and exhaustion.

In my daily life, I was a good Catholic girl, working in the inner city to provide a home and spiritual guidance for homeless single mothers and their children. But my polished exterior and public displays of good work blanketed the reality that I was fragmented, empty, thirsting for God — and seriously ill. After I hit the floor, I said: “God, tell me everything is going to be OK.”

The greater gift, however, is the illness and the pain it inflicts — not the pain itself, but what the pain does for my soul.

And I immediately heard a voice of radical hope: “Oh, Monica, if you only knew.”

I have been sick since I was 19, and for five years I endured it without knowing what I actually had. This summer I was finally diagnosed with a cocktail of autoimmune diseases. Honestly, I do not remember what it is like to feel well for a long period of time.

It was infuriating and exhausting to live in a body with a faceless attacker. The first symptoms began in my digestive tract. Over the years, more organs have suffered. Pain has crept into every part of my body.

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The author, Monica Arbery, in a happy, healthy moment

I never knew there were tiny bones in my hands until they began to hurt and swell and, for a while, not move at all. I use a cane to walk most of the time. My body feels like rigid pottery that is starting to crack. I have difficulty keeping food down. The sun gives me rashes. My memory is abysmal. My heart has an arrhythmia that makes breathing labored.

Lately, I get exhausted if more than one person is in my room with me. Each week, I receive injections of a chemotherapy drug to stop my immune system from attacking itself. The severity of all of this has ebbed and flowed over the years.

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In January of this year, I was feeling wonderful and active, and thought I was healed. But while on a run in the red hills of Wyoming, I fell over, vomited — and my health plummeted to the worst it has ever been. I did not think I would live past April. So, this June, to finally call the demon by many names was a relief, a sadness, and a gift.

The greater gift, however, is the illness and the pain it inflicts — not the pain itself, but what it does for my soul.

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It is an instrument of grace that has become part of me. Of course, it is annoying, limiting, and ceaseless. But it is precisely in these things that pain is privilege, a steady companion that demands responsibility from me and challenges me to live.

I did not think I would live past April. To finally call the demon by many names was a relief, a sadness, and a gift.

In God I live and move and have my being, and He continues to show me that I live and move and have my being most fully in the chronic pain of illness. I live in pain with Him. I suffer with Him. And in this gift of pain, as He alluded to me in my Chicago apartment, I have never known such joy. I have never laughed as much as I do now.

When hardship sweeps into our lives, we hear two voices — and both are terrifying. The first voice shouts to us that suffering will destroy our future and our dreams, so we must resist the pain. This is the voice I listened to for years. The second voice whispers and invites us to let the pain enter into us completely, and in so doing our lives, again, will not unfold as we had imagined.

The shout tells us to ignore the pain and carry on because we must not destroy how we appear to the world. The whisper, though, tells us that the pain will instruct us and rattle everything we thought we knew — and wholly transform our lives. But if we adhere to that whisper, we will have to relinquish control. The thought of that horrifies us.

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Since I cannot control a body that attacks itself, one that is its own little war zone, it is my natural instinct to control everything else that I can: namely, my appearance and anything that people can see when they look at me.

Obsessive control is an attempt to hide from the truth. For years — and this is still my toughest battle — my soul was veiled with vanity, pettiness, false humility, and pride as I struggled with the big life that I wanted and the reality of my illness, which would require sacrifice and surrender. I was losing my soul. That’s what happens when we deny truth.

I reached a point, however, where I could no longer silence that whisper of Christ. It invited me to completely allow the pain in my body.

A couple of months ago, my blood had attacked my brain so badly that I didn’t recognize my own unforgettable mother. For 20 minutes, I sat there, unaware of who this gregarious, beautiful Sicilian woman was before me. I had been in a flare for months, becoming emaciated, brittle, unable to move without assistance. As my body stiffened and beat with torment, as simple tasks became impossible to perform, my heart cracked open.

My blood had attacked my brain so badly that I didn’t recognize my own unforgettable mother.

Each day in my prayers, I would grow closer to saints like Saint Teresa of Calcutta, Saint Therese of Lisieux, and Saint John Paul II, and I dove into the writings of Flannery O’Connor, who had lupus.

Still, as I write this, I look around my room and I see their photos and holy cards everywhere. I see the roses I keep for my statue of Saint Therese. I see the peacock feathers reminding me of Ms. O’Connor, clicking on her typewriter and giving us stories so hilarious and grotesque and true while she tended to her Georgian farm with peacocks roaming around her.

These Holy Ones of God were overflowing with joy, and they lived in suffering. And the day that this autoimmunity stopped targeting just my physical body and shot into my mind — when I did not know my mom standing before me — my soul had to collapse and re-emerge as something new.

I recalled the words of St. John Paul II: “On the far side of every cross we find the newness of life in the Holy Spirit, that new life which will reach its fulfillment in the resurrection. This is our faith. This is our witness before the world.”

If I needed to become new, if I needed to suffer and be fully alive, then I needed to let the pain in — so I did, and it hurt.

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Then, an epiphany: The remedy for my controlling and self-interested soul was accepting an illness for which there is no remedy.

I have had to embrace the paradox of truth and relinquish control. Letting go led to loss — loss of relationships, a work that I loved, a body that I recognized, an identity I had given myself. But allowing these fleeting things to dissipate has created a space in my being that only the Eternal can fill.

I lost my life and found it. I keep finding the fullness of my life as I live with something that I thought was severing my greatness; and I see that, although my suffering is a tragedy in its own right, the greater tragedy would have been to never suffer it.

Now, I love so much the smallness of my life. The limitations of my body have forced me to be creative, to speak my heart through avenues I never would have pursued, and to enter into prayer so rich and deep it stings my eyes.

“All human nature vigorously rejects grace because grace changes us and change is painful.”

The most important work I have ever done, I now understand, is not in the inner city of Chicago — but from my sickbed in my parents’ house in Wyoming, in pain, paralysis, and prayer. On the most physically unpleasant days, there is peace, edification, and gladness in my soul. God is constantly breathing life into me, and He is nurturing a freedom inside of me that nothing can destroy except the denial of my illness and the temptation to let it define me.

It is a difficult balance. But I am becoming the woman I am meant to be through the grace of something I pretended did not exist, and thought was destroying the essence of who I am.

As Flannery O’Connor said, “All human nature vigorously rejects grace because grace changes us and change is painful.”

A few days ago, I found a journal entry from April 2012. I had been sick for about six months at that time. I was feeling the ache of loss, and had just turned 20 years old. As I read it, I felt humbled at the truth that God listens to every whispered prayer and thought:

“You took away everything I was clinging to — everything into which I put my hope, except for Yourself. They were good things, and maybe I would have been just fine if I had never lost them — but what deep and painful suffering I would have missed! What gasps of deep loss — for You, my Savior, to fill.”

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I did not know then that the chasm of loss would deepen and widen as time went on, nor did I know the peace that surpasses all understanding would pour into it. I am so glad God keeps the future a secret, so that we may not rebel against it and desperately cling to our lives. I am so glad for the gift of pain: to be entrusted with something larger than ourselves, this mysterious agent of stinging and transformative grace propelling us upward, even when our legs don’t work.

If only we knew.

Monica Arbery studied at the University of Dallas and worked as the residential coordinator of Monica’s House in Chicago, a Catholic program for homeless single mothers and their children. She now lives in Wyoming; her passion is still bringing light and love to others, especially the suffering. As of late, she spends her time reading, praying, writing and learning wisdom through friendships.