Every morning it takes me about two hours to be able to walk through the house without holding on to furniture and countertops. Then it takes an hour and a half of physical therapy exercises to be able to get through the day, not without pain, but without making noises when I move. Often I need to stop halfway from the parking lot and the church house or doctor's office or grocery store and lean over for a while to make the pain bearable. No longer does Keith wheel the grocery cart for me as I shop; instead, I hang onto it so I can make it through what used to be an enjoyable part of my routine. It may not have been an "old lady" fall, but it has certainly turned me into an old lady almost overnight.
I seldom sleep well any more. I have found only one position I can lie in without considerable pain. I start out that way and then, in the night, when I move the pain wakes me. It takes a few minutes to get back into position and then wait out the pain until it settles down and I finally drift back to sleep. It will happen again and again as the night wears on. What ought to be an eight hour rest is seldom more than five or six. Then, after a week of that, I will finally have a decent sleep just because I am so exhausted that I can sleep through the pain.
On nights when that happens and I wake fairly well rested, my mind thinks all is well. Then I try to stretch or roll over and suddenly I realize that nothing has changed. The pain is still there. It will never stop. It is, in a word, relentless, and that is the worst part. I have had worse pain, especially in my eyes—battery acid drops in an eye with a fresh incision or on a freshly abraded (scraped) cornea. But at least that pain always stops eventually, the one after 10 or 15 minutes and the other after three or four days. After all these years, I know that and can put up with it. Nothing, however, has stopped this hip pain that radiates up and down my whole leg, and after trying so many things it appears that nothing will.
Jesus spent a lot of words trying to describe Hell in a way that would horrify us. He wants us to avoid that place at all cost and doesn't mind using some negative reinforcement. Now I have found something that will motivate me like nothing else. Eternity is difficult to describe too, but I think the Eternity of Hell is now easy for me to comprehend. It is relentlessness. Whatever you use as your picture—fire, pain, dark, all of those things and more—it will always be there, without a break, without even a moment's relief. Now I understand the rich man in Jesus's parable—just a drop of water on my tongue, he asked for. Just a few minutes without this relentless pain, I think. But Hell has no tomorrow, just the ever-present Now that never ends.
I tried to find an antonym for relentless, something positive that never ends. Nothing really suited me, either in online dictionaries or Merriam-Webster. Then I asked myself what would make this pain just a little more bearable, and came up with "hope." You see, the doctor did make one suggestion that I tried and the pain actually went away for 5 days. But there is one insurmountable problem. That medication also worsens my eye problems. Which would I rather have, no pain or eyesight? I am sure you know the answer to that! Even if I reach the point that I can no longer move at all, I still want to see—flowers, sunsets, rainbows, and all the beautiful faces of the ones I love.
But we have come up with a compromise—I can take that medication for one week every four months. That means that three weeks out of the year I will have no pain! Do you know how marvelous that sounds after the last six months? That sounds like "hope." You better believe I am looking forward to that week and more than that, I know it will happen because we have already tried it once. I trust that it will work again.
Hope is the thing that should carry you through your life, no matter how bad things get. What did we expect anyway? This world is cursed by sin and death and we brought it on ourselves. But God gives us hope. Our eternity does not have to be relentless. Because God gives us the hope of the resurrection, we can look forward to relief from the pain and suffering we all live with. No, hope is not "a thing with feathers." It is a strong and heavy anchor that will keep us from drifting if we hang onto it with all our might.
So when God desired to show more convincingly to the heirs of the promise the unchangeable character of his purpose, he guaranteed it with an oath, so that by two unchangeable things, in which it is impossible for God to lie, we who have fled for refuge might have strong encouragement to hold fast to the hope set before us. We have this as a sure and steadfast anchor of the soul, a hope that enters into the inner place behind the curtain, where Jesus has gone as a forerunner on our behalf, having become a high priest forever after the order of Melchizedek (Heb 6:17-20).