There are moments that recur in my thoughts. I know you have them, too. Reels of sights, sounds, smells, sensations, that play in my memory. Faces, diagnoses, situations. Flashes that sneak up from the stuffed subconscious and demand conscious attention.
Scene: Somewhere in Santa Clara County, California. Skilled nursing facility. COVID Unit. “Barbara’s” room.
I walked by just in time to see her pick up her water bottle and to see her fighting hard against the Parkinsonian tremors she cannot will away. The bottle wobbled back and forth in her grasp before falling briefly onto her lap, rolling onto the floor, then gushing onto the hard linoleum between her bed and her roommate’s bed, a mere curtain separating the two.
Determined, she picked up a wide-mouthed glass of lemonade with a straw in it, the cup waving wildly and the straw dancing back and forth as she tried to draw it to her lips. This, too, fell into her lap, covering her thin gown and soaking her frail body. Her tremors are more pronounced now than they had been this morning, as if she had almost no control over the movements in her limbs. She asked me for her PRN anti-anxiety medication.
I asked the CNA for help getting her clean and dry while I went in search of her medicine. Like so many things in this place, the medicine was missing, and there wasn’t a pharmacy on hand to replenish it.
I returned to find her half-dressed, twisted in her gown. The CNA outside the door raised her hands in a show of innocence as told me Barbara had insisted on putting it on herself. Barbara was breathing rapidly, and I could tell her pulse was racing.
If she was embarrassed, it didn’t show.
Nor was she frustrated.
She was afraid.
I crouched down next to her nearly floor-level bed and asked her if something was upsetting her. She told me she had just gotten off the phone with her sister, and her sister was telling her about the novel Coronavirus. For perhaps the first time, she realized what it meant that she was in the COVID unit.
I took a deep breath and looked into her eyes from behind foggy glasses and face shield, trying to ignore the N95 digging into the bridge of my nose. “Barbara, let me tell you something: You are breathing on your own. Your lungs are strong and clear. You don’t have a fever. Your body is fighting this. You’re going to be ok.”
And my mind keeps telling me – our world needs someone to look them in the eyes, take them by the hand and tell them:
You are strong.
You are fighting this.
You are going to be ok.
Maybe that’s exactly what you need to hear. I wish I could stop there. I want that feel-good ending.
But that isn’t the whole story, is it? I almost swallowed those words as soon as I’d said them to Barbara. Most of the patients in the COVID Unit I worked in will recover from the virus. But most of them will not recover from the disease and injury that brought them to the facility in the first place. The dementia and diabetes. The Parkinson’s, the cancer, the heart disease, the terminal illnesses. They will not simply be “ok.”
Most of us will recover from the damage this year has done to our bodies and our wallets, eventually. But our souls are crying out. The stuffed subconscious will not be ignored.
We are desperate for SOMETHING right now. And sometimes it feels like a grasping for who-knows-what, because what do you hold onto when all of your handholds break?
This is not Barbara 😉 This is my delightful housemate, Becki.
We are desperate for deeper. Desperate for truer. Desperate for peace. Desperate for all the headlines to be taken back. Desperate to cling to our sense of control – yet every new diagnosis and every next (un)natural disaster reminds us how mistaken that notion of control must be.
Maybe desperate is exactly where we are supposed to be. We have become proud, defiant, self-satisfied, numb. And yet this year has brought so many to one of two places:
- 1. Desperate to believe that there is a God who is good and omnipotent when all feels wrong.
Or
- 2. Desperate to defy an omniscient God that would allow all this mess to happen. All these lives to be broken. All these dreams to die.
It strikes me that this is probably exactly where an all-powerful God would have us be. Looking up beyond the screens of our smart phones and Zoom meetings to be reminded WHO holds the power. WHO holds the future. WHO will hold us though the world falls apart around us – though our carefully constructed worlds are falling apart around us.
It strikes me that we are being reminded that we have a choice. We can keep fighting with our own faltering strength and our own meager means.
Or we can surrender.
We can recognize that when we’ve offered all the fight we have in our bones, our striving was never meant to be good enough.
Enter Jesus.
You know the story. Do you feel it, too? The pull to bring out the lights and the decorations and the merry earlier this year? The need for something to celebrate?
How about THE reason to celebrate? It’s not about twinkling trees and glowing store windows, folks. It wasn’t joy because of a gift-laden tannenbaum. It was Jesus’ birth that has caused people to sing joy to the world for more than two millennia.
Barbara’s tremors remind me just how much our bodies betray what our spirits sense: that we have a desperate need for hope and reassurance. A need to be reminded that all will be ok – ultimately. If we chose to believe in Him who does not change with the next outbreak, the next earthquake, the next lay-off, the next devastating loss.
One day, we will all be in a situation from which our bodies will not heal. And there will be weeping. Or there will be celebration.
I don’t just want a Xanax to appease the anxiety. I want the Jesus who offers eternity.
mojoy1494 