Yes, It Is a Big Deal (and that’s OK)

It’s 2:30 AM. I roll over in bed. The room tilts for a second. My stomach lurches.

That was weird. I get up to walk to the bathroom. Almost fall. I’m holding on to everything, just trying to make it there and back. Feel like I might vomit. What is wrong with me?

I wake Mark up, tell him my symptoms, discover I feel OK if I lay perfectly still on my back. I try to sleep, but every time I fall asleep, I unconsciously roll onto my side, and the spinning wakes me up.

The carnival ride continues for several hours, but gradually it lessens. By 7 AM I’m able to lift my head, to briefly get out of bed. But I have to eat my breakfast in shifts; too long sitting upright and the spinning begins again in full force. I cancel our plans to go swimming.

Most of the morning, I rest on the couch, first flat on my back, then gradually reclining, then sitting up. By lunch, I can do the dishes, but I still need breaks. My thoughts vacillate between, What is happening? and Will it ever stop?

It was one of the weirdest mornings of my life. I still have no idea what caused the vertigo, but thankfully, it gradually subsided over the next day and a half.

And like all strange events, it got me thinking. I’ve never experienced vertigo before, and I’ve never really thought about how terrible it would be. If you’d told me you struggled with vertigo, I would have felt for you, but having no grid for what it’s like, I would not have understood the magnitude of your experience.

We do this more than we care to admit. If we don’t have a grid for someone else’s pain, it’s easy to dismiss or minimize it. It’s easy to even start thinking they’re making a big deal of something that isn’t that big of a deal. I mean, we all know certain things are terrible, like the death of a loved one or a terminal diagnosis. We readily make room for those kinds of grief. But other struggles—it’s easy to judge another person’s strength based on his or her ability to handle a hardship in a way that makes sense to us.

One time, I experienced something that, on the surface, appeared small. Nothing really happened—just the beginning of a thing, but nothing truly serious. Not really. And yet, to me, it was a very big thing. It was a betrayal, a violation, a spinney carnival ride. And I felt sick to the core. I could hardly breathe, and my head kept spinning. My attempt at processing became hysterical. And in that moment, a well-meaning friend, trying to calm me down, told me, “You need to stop making a big deal out of it. Nothing really happened.”

I believed that person, and I shoved it down. Not only that, but I learned from that experience that my response to pain must be proportionate to other people’s expectations. That an episode like that could diminish another person’s opinion of me. That strength looks like being in control. And just like that, I learned how to make my heart be quiet.

I write much more on the danger of a silent (hard) heart and my journey into wholeheartedness in my book. Eventually, I broke free. I learned to feel. Yet, I always struggled with feeling bad when I had strong feelings about something that seemed like it shouldn’t be a big deal.

Then, I heard Bill Johnson say something that shook my world. Essentially, he said we don’t get to choose how a situation impacts us. In other words, something seemingly small can have a deep impact on one person and a small impact on another. And which one it is for me is not up to me. If something hits me hard, it’s not a sign that I’m weak. The degree of impact has nothing to do with a person’s maturity.

Here’s the thing: We just don’t get to judge whether or not something “should be” hard or is legitimately a “big deal” for someone else (or ourselves).  

Now, when something that isn’t universally hard feels hard for me, I’ve learned to give myself grace. I tell myself, “It’s OK that this feels hard.” Instead of pretending I don’t feel things because I think I shouldn’t, I focus on letting myself be present in that moment and allowing Jesus to meet me in it.

Accepting my own process has also helped me to be more accepting of other people. When they struggle in ways that don’t make sense to me, I am reminded of my own “big deals” and that Jesus has never once judged me for having strong feelings.

Paul the apostle called God “the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort” (2 Cor. 1:3 NIV). God invented comfort—rest for the weary and healing from life’s “big deals.” We are always safe with him. But it doesn’t end there. Part of the purpose for his comfort in our lives is to enable us to comfort others when they face their own troubles, whether they seem like a “big deal” to us or not (see 2 Cor. 1:3–5).

I’m convinced many of us are not very good at being patient with the pain of others because we have not yet learned to be patient with ourselves in our own pain. The truth is: God is not frustrated with or impatient about your pain. Instead, he made a way so that even in our hardest moments “our comfort abounds through Christ” (2 Cor. 1:5 NIV).

To purchase Amy’s book, The Way Back to Hope, CLICK HERE!

Subscribe to Amy’s mailing list to receive a FREE downloadable study guide for The Way Back to Hope and be the first to know when she posts a new blog.