Struggling

At the beginning of this year, I was married, a stay at home mom, a doting wife to a man who made me angry on a daily basis, a man who was pretty certain we would stay unhappily married for life, and to whom I was also certain I would attempt to remain committed to for eternity.

 

I used to ask him if it made him sad that there was no marriage in heaven, because it did make me somewhat confused and hurt. I gave so much of myself to him that I couldn't imagine not being with Jon in eternity, especially his sinfree self! He said it didn't matter to him much and that everyone would love everyone the same in heaven, that loving God would be our priority, as it should be now.

 

Jon had excellent ideas and intentions and was honest if not romantic. I was very attracted to the man he should have been. He simply wasn't the man he intended to be. I would have been very happily married to him if he would have kept up with half the things he intended and if he hadn't tortured me and himself so much about the rest. But, his standards for living a "godly" life became sins, the sins of control and meanness. His demands for himself and on me became impossible and led to years of unkindness and depression, a cycle that centered on his impression of God and one that became impossible to break.

 

I say it was impossible because for years I tried to help him break it. However ... all things are possible with God, and I do believe in my heart that if I had stayed married to my husband that God very well could have changed his heart eventually. I didn't want to wait for Jon to be kind to me, for Jon to stop controlling me. I didn't want to wait for God to change Jon or to fix my marriage, so I left. I regret this to a degree, and it's a heartbreaking regret, one that I may never quite come to terms with, but I also know that Jon's behavior was abusive and wrong... I have to come to terms with it, because for me and my daughter, I believe I made the right choice.

 

From a stay at home mom and wife to a divorced working mom is a big change, a hard change, and one that has caused emotional and even physical stress on my body. I'm doing my best for Daphne, for my family, for David, for my patients... it's hard. Sometimes my best sucks. I complain a lot. I don't pray enough. I don't seek God enough. I don't try enough. I eat too much. I list these negatives like a repeating soundtrack throughout my day, and I'm tired, I'm tired of it. I want to try harder and to do better, but it's hard.

 

This year has been hard. I'm working through it. I'm doing my best, but sometimes it's not enough.

Predetermined steps

As I seek God, there are some areas where I have to take an honest look at myself and at what I am really looking for.

 

I want to find Truth but I am limited by some areas where I have a predetermined view point.

 

I do not want to find a God who hates homosexuality; who annihilates entire races of people; who would have some suffer eternally because they worship Allah instead of Him; who is only male and not female (though I do call my God Father, I believe in my heart of His gender duality despite the pronouns).

 

While I seek God, I need to keep an open mind. My mind is somewhat closed to these views of God, though they are biblical and traditional. My mind is closed to them because they don't mesh with my heart's view of Him, of who I believe Him to be, or of whom I want Him to be.

 

What do I know of Holy? a popular song asks. Very little, I admit. Sacred encounters are few while daily life is overrun with inconsistent relationships, harried tasks, irritating conflicts, suffering, joys, sleeping, eating and monotony.

 

I spend many hours in prayer every week, asking God to heal the sick at the hospital. But, I don't really fellowship with Him like I would like to... I miss Him.

 

Without the Lord, my life is darkness. He gives me hope and light and mercy and love. I need Him and want Him more than any other. My soul cries out for Him, but I don't know Him.

 

Lord, while I seek you, open my mind and my heart to the truth of who you are. Provide me with resources, with people, with books to illuminate my mind and my heart to your truth. Reveal your mystery to me and speak your truth to me. Help me to know you as you truly are even if I am uncomfortable with who or what that is.

Killing hands

At the beginning of my day, I am given a list of all the hospital's patients and their room numbers. I know their name, their age, their gender and a one word description of their diagnosis. That's all I know about them before I knock on their door and introduce myself. There are, of course, some mild surprises: a 100 year old man with excellent hearing next door to a 47 year old dying woman. I used to see the age plus gender and calculate a judgement, but now I know each room contains a surprise; each person I speak to is very different.

 

Today, I met a man who murdered with his hands.

 

Age: 66

Diagnosis: Vomiting

 

He had been at the hospital a few days, so I knew he was probably dehydrated or else something malevolent hid beneath that diagnosis. (That's happened before, too. A diagnosis of pneumonia often hides lung cancer and other vicious ills.)

 

I walked into a dark room and he turned on the light. My eyes adjusted and he looked like everyone else. I'm becoming accustomed to this daily prayer walk with the patients and they look alike now, they are old or young, or black or white, or male or female. It's only in the talking to them that I know them and in the praying for them that they become people again. I hear their stories and I pray with them and they matter to me. They are on my heart, now, and I remember their details.

 

His details are on my fingertip.

 

"Hey there, young'n, young one, young girl, young woman, howyadoin?" he said.

 

I laughed and answered him that I was well.

 

"Well, well, yep, I'm swell, I'm Ronnie, or Ronzo, or Ronald. I get to go home today," he said. "I'm feeling a might better. Can you keep a secret?"

 

I smiled and nodded.

 

"I can't eat the shi ... crap they call food. (You said you was a preacher lady, right?) My wife's going to get me some REAL food at McDonald's," he said. "They said I can go home once'n I can keep some food down."

 

I prayed with him then, that his food would stay down, that he could go home and get some rest, and that God would bless his wife, who was a support and an encouragement to him.

 

"Hey, hey, you got that right," he said, when I finished praying. "My wife's been taking care of me for 40 years. Course, she is my second wife. Found the first one in bed with some dudezo when I got back from my first tour. Dropped my AWOL bag on the ground, threw a silver dollar at the dude humping my wife, and I said, 'You just bought the bitch.' I walked across the street to Dadzo's house and, boy, you want to talk about surprised? My dadzo was so happy to see me home. I showed him that guy getting into his car across the way, holding all his clothes and shit in his hands, and I said, 'Dadzo, we're getting drunk.'"

 

I laughed with him.

 

"So, I got drunk for the next two days, with Dadzo and Moms, and then I decided to take another tour over there. Fucking Viet Nam. See, over there, you knew who the enemy was ... I fucked up some Mama Sans. I did some evil shit over there," he said and the room got colder and darker. 

 

I looked at him seriously and nodded for him to go on. In the short time I have been here, I have heard confessions, and this seemed like his.

 

"I couldn't help it. It was just ... See, it was just these fuckers in black pajamas over there, and we were bad motherfuckers, you know? I used to fucking staple an ace of spades to their heads after I did em. It was my calling card," he said. 

 

I swallowed and nodded again.

 

"It ain't no different than what they're doing over there now in Iraq," he said. "But now these guys come back and they're fucking heroes. You know what they called me? A baby killer," he spat.

 

It was quiet for a minute. I waited for him.

 

"Oh, well. You keep serving God. I'm a believer, you know. I seen heaven when I died," he said.

 

"You have? Tell me about it," I said seriously. He looked up at me.

 

"Come here," he said. I came over to him. "Give me your hand." I gave it to him.

 

He took my finger and placed it on his forehead. There was an indentation that before wasn't visible but my finger took in its details. It felt like two plates of his skull didn't quite mesh together there.

 

"That's where I got shot. Dunzo. See this hole on the side? That's where the bullet came out. I went to heaven. I saw my grandma. See, I ain't seen my grandma since I was nine or ten years old. I saw her and she hollered for me to go in the gates. So, I put my leg in and I heard the most beautiful voice and I saw this hand with a, well, like a square railroad tie? In the middle? I saw this hand like to push me out and the voice said, 'Ronald, I am not ready for you.'"

 

I was standing very close to him. My finger still remembered the hole in his skull. He smelled like a spicy aftershave and his steel grey hair was greasy.

 

"I felt my soul crash back down to earth. When I woke up, a colored woman was putting a tag on my toe. I popped up and she screamed, 'You're alive!'" He laughed loudly. "I will see him again someday, but God ain't ready for me just yet, young lady," he said.

 

I laughed too and soon after made my exit.

 

I look at my hands, hands that held my baby, hands that pray, hands that destroyed my marriage, and I think about murdering hands, healing hands, about people and their stories, and I seek. I seek God in this. This is life. We are all a part of this creation, His creatures, and He loves us so.

 

Equally so? So much He sent His son to die for us. To suffer and die. An ace of spades on the forehead of someone's mother. God, where are you in this? In the redemption, in the forgiveness, in the grace and renewal. In the details, God, I seek you.

Healing

HEALING

I am not a mechanism, an assembly of various sections

And it is not because the mechanism is working wrongly that I am ill

I am ill because of wounds to the soul, to the deep emotional self

And the wounds to the soul take a long, long time, only time can help

And patience, and a certain difficult repentance,

Long, difficult repentance, realization of life’s mistake, and the freeing oneself

From the endless repetition of the mistake

Which mankind at large has chosen to sanctify

D.H. LAWRENCE

I met a man today who told me his hands were healing hands.

I have no reason to doubt him.

He was quite sane.

I chose to sit by him at a luncheon today, a stranger, a man among a sea of women, all of them decades older than I am. I introduced myself and he smiled and said, "I have a story to tell you."

He spoke of Paraguay then, a country foreign to me, and he told me of a girl named Adella. Migraines razored her brain regularly and she couldn't join the group he was speaking to one day, so he asked if he could pray for her. In Adella's tent, he saw rags covering her face to keep out the slivers of light that punctured her eyes. He placed his hand on her and demanded that the Holy Spirit of God heal her in the name of Jesus.

He told me, moments later Adella slid the rag from her brow and motioned to him excitedly ... Healed.

His greatest joy, he said with some stilled emotion, was seeing this same girl with her newborn baby the next year, after he had prayed for that life inside her, because Adella had miscarried the two babies before this.

His hands healed, he said, because he had faith they would and because the people whom he healed had faith that God would heal them.

Christians all know the Biblical examples of healing stories, not just the Divine cases where Christ placed his perfect hands on a broken limb and it straightened, but where the disciples, sinners just like us, had the power to heal.

Skeptics scoff... Of course. That's what they do.

I seek. I want to know of this healing. I want to know if it's a matter of faith or a matter of prayer or a matter of fate. I want to know if God's mind can be changed... Do we just need to stand on this? Remind Him of the suffering ones here? Believe it can be done ... and it will?

Healed. This girl and the others he spoke of were healed. I believed this man. He was not lying to me and he was not lying to himself. Did his hands heal? Did God use his hands?

I don't know the answers to my questions, yet. Even as I pray for healing for my friends, for my cherished loves, for my patients, for myself, I wait for the mystery to be revealed. I wait and I seek.

Inspiration

Rainer Maria Rilke, from Rilke’s Book of Hours: Love Poems to God 

I am praying again, Awesome One. 

You hear me again, as words 

from the depths of me 

rush toward you in the wind. 

I’ve been scattered in pieces, 

torn by conflict, 

mocked by laughter, 

washed down in drink. 

In alleyways I sweep myself up 

out of garbage and broken glass. 

With my half-mouth I stammer you, 

who are eternal in your symmetry. 

I lift to you my half-hands 

in wordless beseeching, that I may find again

the eyes with which I once beheld you. 

I am a house gutted by fire 

where only the guilty sometimes sleep 

before the punishment that devours them 

hounds them out into the open.

I am a city by the sea 

sinking into a toxic tide. 

I am strange to myself, as though someone unknown 

had poisoned my mother as she carried me.

It’s here in all the pieces of my shame 

that now I find myself again. 

I yearn to belong to something, to be contained 

in an all-embracing mind that sees me 

as a single thing. 

I yearn to be held 

in the great hands of your heart — 

oh let them take me now. 

Into them I place these fragments, my life, 

and you, God — spend them however you want. 

We are not alone

She was a fragile arm and peeking eyes, a nest of hair on her pillow.

"I'm Joannie, I'm a chaplain, here. Remember me?" I said, even as she nodded and wiped tears from her eyes.

"I saw your sister upstairs," I told her. "She is even walking around, recovering well from the surgery." I paused. "She told me what was going on with you, too." I said, as I walked over to her.

The slight arm brushed the tangled hair a bit and tears spilled. I sat down close to her and she said, "I'm so scared."

"I would be scared, too. Right now, they are just testing for cancer, they don't know it's cancer yet ... but I would be scared, too," I said.

"I feel like a little girl," she sobbed.

I smoothed her sweaty hair back from her face. I felt so helpless and wordless.

"It's ok to be scared. It's a scary thing to hear," I said.

"I did this to myself," she cried. "I'm so scared that God is mad at me ... When I was younger ... when I was younger, I took a page of the Bible and used it to roll a ... cigarette ... with."

"Oh, honey," I laughed as I took her hand, "He's a big God. He can handle that one."

"I wasn't as good a person as I should have been, you know?" she said through tears.

"I do know, because no one is. He's the Creator, He's the only perfect One. He loves us anyway and forgives us for all of these things."

"I just think that if I have cancer it's because of what I done to myself, because I wasn't a good person," she said crying and crying.

Fiercely, I said, "That is not true. You listen to me. Bad things happen to good people. Good things happen to bad people. Life is a series of ups and downs, light and dark, joys and sufferings. You did not do this to yourself. This just happened."

She held my eyes with hers, held my hand with hers and we prayed to our Father. We prayed that He would shower His love on her and that she would feel His forgiveness and mercy. We prayed against cancer, we prayed for healing and for peace and for comfort.

"I love you," she said to me and my eyes opened with tears of their own. "I love you and I don't even know you," she said.

"I love you, too," I said as I cried with her.

I spend my days praying for the sick, praying for healing, praying for their comfort, for their strength, for God's peace to infiltrate their hearts, for doctors and nurses, for family member's courage.

At bedsides, I seek God as one who should know God. I seek Him as urgently and desperately as those for whom I pray. I speak as one who knows, but I seek humbly as one who doesn't. I speak of the light as one who lives in it, but I live as one who can see it only in the darkness; one who has hope.

In this journey, I am grateful that my Creator has given me these opportunities to serve as I seek, to serve my brothers and sisters who seek Him alongside me. I am grateful that as we seek Him, we know we are not alone.

Seeking

“Can a mother forget the baby at her breast

    and have no compassion on the child she has borne?

Though she may forget,

    I will not forget you!

 See, I have engraved you on the palms of my hands ... "

Isaiah 49:15-16

Open hands allow water to flow through fingers, and I see the streams descend through my tears. It's a daily arrangement I have, this crying thing, and I don't try to block it unless it heaves against my chest when others are around and how socially inappropriate that would be...

Words in the Bible describe Christ's tears like blood rivulets, and these are just words, right? How can we know tears like blood? Suffering haunts me but I know nothing of these tears like blood.

I read these words in Isaiah yesterday, and I cried again. A life of joys and sorrows like any other, I have led so far, and I am in the midst of darkness this week ... this year. Fleeting hope is oxygen to my spiritlungs, and I've spent time holding my spiritbreath.

I read these words and I remember holding my darling daughter to my breast, her every detail so astonishingly small, so beautiful, and how tenderly I loved her, I love her.

How can God love me this much? More?

See, I have engraved you on the palms of my hands ...

My hands destroyed my marriage this year. My marriage was a painful place of resentments and discord, a battlefield. But, as I look back now, eight months after my hands destroyed, I see that there was a light of hope there as there is always hope. I chose to look elsewhere. I chose to be happy.

People will tell you things about being happy, I have found. There are those who will say that being happy is of utmost importance. "Find your happiness, follow your heart," is their mantra. Others will tell you that happiness is a temporary state, one that is impossible to maintain. Happiness is not the goal for these people. Doing what is right is their goal.

Mentally, spiritually, I found it all very confusing. I still do.

I know this: I sought happiness outside of my marriage. I chose to get divorced because I was very unhappy with my husband and he knew I was unhappy and he chose not to make any attempts to change. I felt at the time that there was no certainty that he and I could be happy with each other ever.

I still feel exactly the same way. There is no certainty that he and I could have ever been happy together. Knowing him the way I do, I have to admit, I don't think we would have been.

Happiness was the goal... tears marking trails in my skin daily tell the truth of my life post-marriage. My tiny daughter is less tiny, fiercely independent, so intelligent and beautiful. She doesn't know what life was like when her parents were married, but she knows something is off now.

"Did you sleep well?" I ask her.

"Yes. I dream Daddy was at home," she said.

Smiling mouth dying heart, I make joy sounds about her Daddy so she hears goodness and only goodness about him always.

Happiness I sought.

Now I seek the only One who has ever fulfilled me, because the emptiness I have endured without Him has been too great to handle. I have many questions without answers, doubts, and fears but I also finally remember that I have hope.

I'm on a journey to find the One who has engraved me on the palms of His hands because without Him, my hands are empty.