I have contracted COVID. It has affected my lungs — that’s to be expected — but it has also raised havoc with my multiple sclerosis. My legs are so weak and spastic again that I can’t walk. I’m back in my wheelchair. It is emotionally difficult to go back in it. But then I remember my prayer in 2018: “Lord, if it is possible, could you let me walk again, even for a short time, even with a cane or a walker?”

I had been in an electric wheelchair for so many, many years. I wanted to feel what it was like to walk again, to use my right arm and hand and hand-write love letters to my wife LaRee again before the end of my life. I wanted to dance a slow dance with her.

For more wisdom about living with sickness, see his What 37 Years with MS Taught Me About Living with COVID.

We did that, dancing in our living room one cold Canadian winter night. Two life-long lovers slowly moving in the low light of flickering embers of a dying fire in our fireplace. Our bodies moved to the gentle rhythm of her favorite love song. It was the last song that we danced to many decades ago before the cold bars of crutches, wheelchairs and leg braces put an end to it. LaRee is once, twice, three times a lady to me, even if we come to the end of our rainbow.

I’ve written love letters to LaRee every day since I got the use of my arm and hand back in 2018. She has dairies full of them.

God granted my prayer. I regained the use of my arm and hand and walked from 2018 to now. It was longer than I expected. Was it a miracle or a sign that God has always been in control? What happens to me is for my own spiritual good.

Hopefully when COVID passes, I will get back the use of my legs. If not, and I must remain in the wheelchair, I will still praise God for letting me walk again, for giving me back the use of my arm and hand, for being with me throughout 38 years of aggressive and terrifying MS.

I will one day understand why.

“For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part, but then I will know just as I am known. And now abide in faith, hope, love, these three; but the greatest of these is love” (1 Corinthians 13:12-13).

Mark Davis Pickup is a Canadian pro-life activist. You can read more of his thoughts and story at his blog, Human Life Matters. His previous article for The Stream was I Cannot Help You Kill Me. Or You.