One thing about cancer and treatment — you think you’re doing great, and you forget you’re still taking oral chemo. The side effects can get you. This week it was a colon blockage that sent me to the ER.
As I’m sitting there waiting, it got me thinking about blockage. I couldn’t walk. I couldn’t sit. I couldn’t sleep. Everything stopped until that blockage was removed. For this ER visit, I was on my way home in about four hours. Physical blockage — arteries, colon — there’s a known fix. Doctors can see it, name it, and clear it. Your body tells you something’s wrong, and you go get it taken care of.
But what about emotional blockage?
Emotional blockage is different than waiting on something you can’t control. The Doorway is about standing between before and after, trusting God’s timing. Blockage is something actively stuck inside you. It’s not that the door hasn’t opened yet — it’s that you can’t walk through it because something is in the way. And unlike a colon blockage, nobody can see it on a scan.
A friend of mine went through a divorce years ago. Afterward, he was guarded — and I mean guarded. He’d date someone for a few months, and then it would end. Every time. Same pattern, same wall.
One day I told him straight: “You’re not recovered from your divorce. It’s been years.”
He looked at me and said, “I’ve had you and another friend I trust say the exact same thing to me in a matter of days. Looks like I need to get back in therapy.”
A few months later, he called and wanted to go to dinner. He’d started dating someone and he was thrilled — not guarded, not bracing for the end. Thrilled. The blockage was removed. He and the woman he met went on to marry and have two sons.
Here’s what I noticed about his story: the blockage wasn’t the divorce. The divorce happened years earlier. The blockage was what the divorce left behind — the fear, the wall, the decision to never be that vulnerable again. And it took two people he trusted saying the same thing before he could hear it. Sometimes the blockage needs more than one voice to break through.
I have my own blockage story, and it’s not one I share very often. But now that the blockage is removed, I can finally talk about it.
When I was eight years old, I was almost sexually assaulted. Luckily, I escaped. But here’s the thing that stayed with me for years — I wasn’t angry at the person who tried to hurt me. I was angry at myself. My parents had told me about stranger danger, and I felt like I had made a bad choice. Like it was my fault.
Back in the ’70s, therapy wasn’t really a thing — at least not for kids. My mom tried to talk to me about it, but my anger at myself kept those conversations from moving me forward. The blockage wasn’t the event. The blockage was the shame I carried for being eight and making a decision that an eight-year-old shouldn’t have to know how to make.
I remember the exact day the blockage was removed. I was a freshman in college, thinking I’d go into social work. As part of the program, you had to volunteer twenty hours of community service. I chose to work with kids from abusive families. After a few months, they asked me to work one-on-one with an eight-year-old girl who was making bad choices at school.
And there it was. I was looking at an eight-year-old — the same age I had been — and I could see with absolute clarity that making a bad choice at eight doesn’t define you. She wasn’t broken. She wasn’t stupid. She was eight. And so was I.
I finally forgave the eight-year-old me.
My father had his own blockage. He and his older brother were farm boys — five and six years old — rolling tires down a hill onto an ice-covered pond. The six-year-old decided to walk out onto the ice. My father, the five-year-old, was too scared to follow. The ice started cracking. His brother drowned.
I didn’t hear the real version of that story until I was well into my forties. My dad had told us before, but it was always the short, veiled version — the one you tell so you don’t have to relive it. This time, when I asked, I got the painful truth. And I watched him relive that pain right in front of me.
His blockage wasn’t shame like mine. His was with God. He had a hard time understanding how God could let that happen to two little boys on a pond. That blockage made faith a struggle for him his whole life. He raised two believers and he believed in something. He walked the path of God in his actions, but faith wasn’t easy for him.
When I think of blockage, I think of a scene in Days of Thunder. Tom Cruise plays a race car driver who crashes because he can’t see through the smoke ahead of him. After he recovers, he can’t race the same way. The wreck is over, but the fear isn’t. Then he’s driving and comes upon a wreck nearly identical to the one that injured him. This time, his teammate tells him he can get through it. And he trusts him. He drives through the smoke — and the blockage is gone.
You can’t go around blockage. You have to go through it. And sometimes you need someone riding next to you, telling you it’s safe to keep going.
There’s a story in John 5 that I think about a lot now. There was a pool in Jerusalem called Bethesda, and people believed that when the water stirred, the first person in would be healed. A man had been lying beside that pool for thirty-eight years. Thirty-eight years of being stuck.
Jesus walked up to him and asked the most direct question in the Bible:
“Do you want to get well?”
— John 5:6
The man didn’t say yes. He said, “Sir, I have no one to help me into the pool when the water is stirred. While I am trying to get in, someone else goes down ahead of me.”
He answered a yes-or-no question with an excuse. And I don’t think he was being difficult — I think he’d been blocked so long that he’d forgotten what it felt like to imagine being free. His blockage had become his identity. He wasn’t a man with a problem anymore. He was the man by the pool. That was who he was.
Jesus didn’t argue with the excuse. He didn’t say, “Well, let me help you into the pool.” He went straight through it:
“Get up! Pick up your mat and walk.”
— John 5:8
Pick up your mat. Don’t just leave the blockage behind — carry the evidence that you were once stuck, so you never forget what free feels like.
Then there’s Lazarus. By the time Jesus got to the tomb, Lazarus had been dead four days. Martha said, “Lord, by this time there will be a bad odor.” But Jesus said:
“Roll away the stone.”
— John 11:39
That was the first blockage — the physical one. Someone else had to remove it. Lazarus couldn’t roll away his own stone. And when Lazarus walked out, he was still wrapped head to toe in burial cloths. Jesus said:
“Take off the grave clothes and let him go.”
— John 11:44
Two blockages. The stone and the wrappings. One kept him in the dark. The other kept him bound even after he was free. And notice — other people had to remove both of them. Lazarus couldn’t unwrap himself.
My friend couldn’t remove his own blockage. It took two friends saying the same hard truth. The man at Bethesda couldn’t get to the pool. It took Jesus asking a question nobody else would ask. I couldn’t forgive myself at eight. It took a different eight-year-old, eleven years later, to show me what I couldn’t see about myself.
Sometimes the blockage needs someone else’s hands to remove it.
I think about the character in The Lost Backpack. That was someone carrying some blockage too.
Paul wrote something in 2 Corinthians that hits differently when you’ve spent time stuck:
“Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom.”
— 2 Corinthians 3:17
Not “there will be” freedom. There is freedom. It’s already there. The blockage is what’s keeping you from reaching it.
And here’s what I’ve learned about blockage — physical and emotional: your body and your soul both know when something is stuck. Your body sends you to the ER. Your soul sends you signals too — the same relationship ending the same way, the anger that won’t go away, the story you can’t tell without your chest tightening. Those are symptoms. The blockage is underneath.
The physical blockage sent me home in four hours. The emotional one took me eleven years. My friend’s took five. But they all had the same ending: the blockage was removed, and life started moving again.
“Do you want to get well?”
— John 5:6
If you’re reading this and thinking about something that keeps you up at night — or thinking about it makes your chest tighten — that’s your blockage. Go get well!
My Prayer
God, show me what’s blocked. Not the thing I already know about — the one underneath it. The one I’ve carried so long I forgot it was there. Give me the courage to name it, and send me the people who will help me remove it — even when their honesty is hard to hear. And when I meet someone who’s been lying by their own pool for years, let me be the one who asks the hard question with love. Help me pick up my mat and walk. Amen.
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