Headaches, Hope, and Becoming Like Christ

by Dennis Gladden, Green Pastures, ©2024

(Mar. 8, 2024) — A month of cluster headaches that began in November led me to learn what is going on inside my head. And two other discoveries happened.

• I understand better how God is making me more like Christ, and
• I find comfort in one of the Apostle Paul’s most discomforting sayings.

The headaches began as they have for 30 years or so: without warning, for no apparent reason, and at the onset of the holidays. The first two awoke me on consecutive nights shortly after 1:00 a.m. The following nights, the pain kindly waited a while, until the nightly awakenings finally settled at around 3:00 a.m.

Unlike the episodes of recent years, the searing pain this time also broke in during the day, usually around noon. Prescriptions relieved the immediate headaches, but nothing interrupted the pattern. I needed relief.

My doctor gave me a steroid shot “to knock the knees out” of this cluster period and also scheduled a CT scan to detect any physical reasons for its intensity. The shot indeed buckled the headaches and the scan uncovered no bleeds or lesions.

“Your CT was normal,” she said.

Good news! And I haven’t had a cluster headache since.

But the scan also had this paragraph:

“Patchy hypoattenuation within the periventricular and subcortical white matter” that is “consistent with mild chronic microvascular ischemic changes.”

The words meant nothing, and when I searched online, I wished I hadn’t. By all accounts, minuscule blood vessels deep in my brain are giving out. These are the foot soldiers of stroke, dementia, and stumbling.

I brought this paragraph to my doctor’s attention and asked if I should be concerned.

“No concern at all …. this is common with ‘maturity,’ ” she said.

Maturity.

I am a senior among citizens.

I am getting old.

No surprise. After 71 birthdays, my hair is thinning and gray. Words, like pesky pups, don’t always come when I summon. I used to give no thought to working all day and then studying in the evening to teach a Sunday School lesson. No more. When work is done, so am I.

And now I know why. All those technical terms in the CT scan tell me my brain is wearing out.

The process frightens me.

But this news infused comfort into something Paul said that can be very discomforting.

Writing about the resurrection, the apostle inserts this alarming comment, “I die daily” (1 Corinthians 15:31). He expands on this in his second letter to the Corinthians, “Though our outward man perish, yet the inward man is renewed day by day” (2 Corinthians 4:16).

The comfort is knowing God is breathing new life in the depths of my being—deeper than the micro-vessels of my brain, even as they deteriorate day by day.

“I am crucified with Christ. I die daily.” His crucifixion is at work in me, killing off the deadly conduct—attitudes, thoughts, and pride—that doesn’t belong. Jesus died because of my sin so that I can die to my sin.

“Nevertheless, Christ lives in me; and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God. The inward man is renewed day by day.” As deep as where the word of God penetrates to the dividing of soul and spirit, the resurrected Christ brings His nature to life in me.

Seeing this work of God anew after my CT scan strengthens my hope in Christ. The scan revealed the advancing inner “maturity,” which I cannot reverse or do much to alter. But the work that Christ is doing in me—putting to death the old ways and renewing His new ways day by day—assures me that He is preparing me to live in His kingdom. Forever.

I can live with this outcome.

This isn’t my story alone; it is yours, too. We are all maturing, and if you have faith in Christ, He is doing the same work in you. Our hair and words and steps show what’s happening inside our bodies; likewise, what we do and say manifests what Christ is doing in our souls.

 Jesus said, “Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works and glorify your Father in heaven” (Matthew 5:16).

Good works? But Jesus said, “There is no one good, but God.” And Paul affirmed, “I know that in me (that is, in my flesh) nothing good dwells”(Romans 7:18).

So anything good that anyone sees about us is the life and death of Christ at work. They watch the old man dying, giving way to the new man in Christ (Ephesians 4:22–24).

I didn’t think so at first, but my CT scan is a “good and perfect gift [that] comes from God” (James 1:17) because I know,

My hope is built on nothing less
Than Jesus’ blood and righteousness.