My medicine cabinet once held reruns of Friends, quizzes predicting where I'll run away to next, a mud-soaked pair of sneakers, a scale, a packed agenda I didn't care about, a bottle of melatonin, and lavender essential oil.
Today, what's left are a book and a journal. Everything else has been stripped away.
...
I've been wringing out the remainder of my strength after twelve hour days on my knees, silent tears soaking my pillow.
It's the gut wrenching stories, not the guts, that keep me tossing and turning all night long. Some of them trigger haunting memories. Others can't be shaken because of how unimaginable they are. The fragility within the intensive care units keeps us on our toes. So much can happen at any second. There's nothing a hospital doesn't see, yet there's only so much medicine can do.
...
"Sorrow makes us go slower and more considerately, and introspect our motives and dispositions. It is sorrow that opens up within us the capacities of the heavenly life, and it is sorrow that makes us willing to launch our capacities on a boundless sea of service for God and our fellows.
We may suppose a class of indolent people living at the base of a great mountain range, who had never ventured to explore the valleys and canyons back in the mountains, it turns the hidden glens into echoing trumpets, and reveals the inner recesses of the valley, like the convolutions of a monster shell, and then the dwellers at the foot of the hills are astonished at the labyrinths and unexplored recesses of a region so near by, and yet so little known.
So it is with many souls who indolently live on the outer edge of their own natures until great thunderstorms of sorrow reveal hidden depths within that were never hitherto suspected...
It takes sorrow to widen the soul."
The Heavenly Life
When my knees lose their feeling, I pull myself into bed and reach for Wishful Thinking. Buechner wrote on compassion: "It is the knowledge that there can never be any peace and joy for me until there is peace and joy finally for you too."
There is no rest until all can rest.
When I wake up shaking to the blackness of night, trying to replace propofol, proning, and PEEP with counting sheep, my mind wanders to the doctors, nurses, and social workers. How hard must they fight to keep their spines strong and hearts soft with every decision and family phone call they make?
...
Stories of suffering are dynamic, evolving minute by minute, resembling a rollercoaster structure at odds with my comfortable plot-climax-resolution framework. I didn't know I was so hesitant to witness raw, complicated wounds until I learned I couldn't repair them.
The unraveling is ruthless, but there is comfort in the confidence that it's pointing me home. Even as the days blur, as I'm plunged back into brain fog the moment I mask up, I think there's a net emergence from numbness. As lifeless as my heart may be these days, after expanding, bending, and twisting in ways I didn’t know were possible, I’m grateful I'm allowed to feel. Who would I be if my heart couldn’t break?
And I thought to myself, oh dear, how ever many skins have I got to take off? ...So I scratched away for the third time and got off a third skin, just like the two others, and stepped out of it. But as soon as I looked at myself in the water I knew it had been no good.
"Then the Lion said - but I don't know if it spoke - 'You will have to let me undress you.'
...The first tear he made was so deep that I thought it had gone right into my heart... Well, he peeled the beastly stuff right off... And there was I as smooth and soft as a peeled switch and smaller than I had been... I found that all the pain had gone from my arm. And then I saw why. I'd turn into a boy again."
Eustace (The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, C.S. Lewis)
As my pen takes inventory of the day's events, hour by hour, threads between what's happening emerge, weaving a bag to hold my mixed emotions. I hear Him saying everything must go so everything can grow. He's not staying in reach. He's shifting from where I'm used to seeing Him. He who holds the stars is stretching me, expanding my capacities, trying to see how hungry and desperate I am for Him. But take courage, dear heart. He's in the waiting. The pressure on my shoulders aren't meant to drown; they're sinking me deeper to build a stronger foundation, one that's wide enough for a neighborhood to rest upon.
Digging up dirt, whether personal, institutional, or systemic, is surely no walk in the park... But wherever clarity and closure are lacking, comfort abounds.
"There is no pit so deep that He is not deeper still."
Corrie ten Boom
"The floods washed away home and mill, all the poor man had in the world. But as he stood on the scene of his loss, after the water had subsided, brokenhearted and discouraged, he saw something shining in the bank which the waters had washed bare. 'It looks like gold,' he said. It was gold. The flood which had beggared him made him rich. So it is ofttimes in life."
H.C. Trumball
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