A Piece of the Continent

Brianna was an ordinary girl who lived an ordinary life. She lived with her mother in a trailer in a rough part of town. Though they weren’t very well off, they had some good things in life. Brianna had friends and extended family—in particular, grandparents—who loved her. She was also noted among her friends as an athlete.

When she was thirteen she began experiencing unexplained motor nerve problems. It took quite a bit of testing for the doctors to find out what was wrong. Brianna had a cancerous growth that had wrapped itself around her spinal cord. There was no feasible way to remove it. Treatment of any kind was going to be a very delicate business. It was made even more uncertain by the fact that Brianna was the youngest person the specialists had ever seen with this particular rare cancer. There was little precedent to go by. The doctors offered little long-term hope.

Cancer treatments always have undesirable side effects, and Brianna’s were no exception. She lost more and more of her motor nerve control, to the point where the former athlete had difficulty even walking. Steroid treatments caused her to gain weight. Brianna experienced a great deal of pain.

Brianna’s reaction was to begin telling everybody she knew “God’s got this.” She prayed, she sang, she asked others to pray for her. They did. We did. Her grandparents, whom she often came to visit over the weekend, were members of our church. They often spoke with me about Brianna’s condition, and the extraordinary way in which she faced it. Sometimes I saw her when she came to visit. As much as it broke our hearts to see her suffer, she also inspired us. Indeed, she inspired a great many people.

People at our church and at others did everything possible to help the family. The congregation became, as it is supposed to be, a greater extended family of support. Always we prayed for Brianna’s healing. Her prognosis was so grim that we were in effect praying for a miracle.

It didn’t come. Her condition did stabilize for a time, and we were hopeful. Then it began degrading again. Though the prayers never stopped, the hopes began to fade. Eventually Brianna decided that she wanted to suspend the now-useless treatments. Since the small town where she lived had no proper hospice center, she spent her final days in a nursing home, a young girl surrounded by feeble elderly who were destined to outlive her.

Not many days ago it became clear that Brianna’s time had come. Those who were there tell me that the friends and family who surrounded her spent her final hour of life singing, while the residents and staff of the nursing home listened. Nobody ever died less alone. It was her fifteenth birthday.

We did not get to see the miraculous healing that we had prayed for. We did see a miracle of another kind. Brianna’s family and friends included some deeply troubled people. People who badly needed new direction in their lives. When they heard Brianna tell them about the faith she had, in the midst of such an ordeal, they began to find it. Lives were changed in an extraordinary way through her, changed in ways that will continue to have effect far beyond the brief span of her life.

One of the most popular and often-quoted poems in the English language is John Donne’s “No Man is an Island.” It is also one of the most profoundly misunderstood. In the first place, it is not actually a poem at all. It is a prose passage from the seventeenth chapter of Donne’s essay “Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions:” “No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the Continent, a part of the main; if a Clod be washed away by the Sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a Promontory were, as well as if a Manor of thy friends or of thine own were; any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.” Somebody, at some point long after Donne’s time, took a fancy to “improve” the passage by arranging it to look like a poem.

The original meaning of the passage is also usually lost in the assumption that it is merely an assertion of some sense of interconnectedness or common humanity among all people. It is indeed that, but it is also much more. Donne goes on to say:

“No man has affliction enough that is not matured, and ripened by it, and made fit for God by that affliction. If a man carry treasure or bullion, or in a wedge of gold, and have none coined into current Monies, his treasure will not defray him as he travels. Tribulation is Treasure in the nature of it, but it is not current money in the use of it, except we get nearer and nearer our home, Heaven, by it. Another man may be sick too, and sick to death, and his affliction may lie in his bowels as gold in a Mine, and be of no use to him; but this bell, that tells me of his affliction, digs out, and applies that gold to me; if by this consideration of another’s danger, I take mine own into contemplation, and so secure myself, by making my recourse unto God, who is our only security.”

The overall theme of Donne’s “Devotions” is that life as it is now is meant to be a preparation for the eternal life to come. Whatever happens to us in this life, good or bad, can be, if we allow it to be, God’s way of preparing us for something better. When we understand that, and trust God with it, we can turn our suffering to our benefit. And one’s own suffering can be turned to the benefit of others.

As far as I know, Brianna never read Donne. But she understood that message. Her life brought great blessings to others, even as it was being so horribly cut short. She knew that. She was okay with it. She kept loving God even when she didn’t get the healing that she wanted so much, because she came to understand that he had something else to accomplish through her. In so doing she dug out the gold in her affliction and offered it freely to others.

We often ask why we suffer. Those who believe in God and try to follow him ask why he allows us and those around us to suffer. Nobody who asks these questions can claim to have the answer to them in every case. But sometimes the answer is that we have to for a greater good, even as players take one for the team, or soldiers are ordered to risk life and limb. Our suffering can bring us benefits, and it can benefit others—if we are prepared to accept and embrace it. This is not a form of fatalism. It is rather a form of active engagement with life’s challenges.

Brianna kept trying to get better until near the very end. Even as she did so, she also tried to make good use of what she was going through. She succeeded. We whose lives were touched by hers, who saw how much some in particular gained by her example, believe that her life was not wasted.

Jesus promised his followers that whatever they gave up in his service would eventually be restored to them, and far more with it. This has traditionally been understood as a promise to those who are persecuted or martyred for the faith. Its applicability goes beyond that. It also applies to the ordinary sufferings of life, when we let God make use of them.

Few pieces of the great Continent of humanity have lived life as well as Brianna did. What God did through her cost her a great deal. She lost at least four-fifths of the years she might reasonably have expected to live. She will never be able to marry or have children; graduate high school or go to class reunions; work for a living or travel to distant places. To have lost so much in God’s service, her rewards must surely be great. We who remember her look forward to seeing her enjoy them.

I first wrote the above a little while ago, shortly after Brianna died. Members of her family have been passing it around as a tribute to her. That's the intention of putting it here.

Thank you for sharing that.

Brianna's grandmother died this past week. She had been in the hospital off and on (mostly on) for months. Yesterday was the first time I'd seen her husband at Sunday school in quite some time, as he had been out taking care of her. He was in good spirits and said "She's completely healed now!" I found out at the funeral visitation yesterday that they had been married for over 20 years (Second marriage for both).

This is wonderfully written.

Bump for Daphne.

Thank you, Linda.

I got to share this with some of Brianna's family yesterday.

Very much so, thank you for sharing.

Anniversary bump. It has been seven years now. Seems like so much has happened since then.

Well-written piece and moving story. Sorry it took me so long to get to reading it.

Eighth anniversary bump.

Eight years? It really doesn't seem that long ago to me.

Ninth anniversary bump.