ink, sweat + cityscapes

I will spend this week, like this past weekend, in the hospital waiting room. It is a microcosm of the broken world we live in. Doctors struggle to understand what is happening to my grandmother’s broken body; we struggle on our knees and lean against one another’s shoulders; the staff struggles to be patient as all 10 of us Meyers & Forsythes filter in and out of Nana’s hospital room; Grampio struggles and looks lost as he wanders around the room. I watch hands. Nana’s hands are cold and puffy: we hold them, hide them under covers, take them out to pray, put them back when the doctors come in to check her vitals. Grampio’s hands go in pockets, on shoulders, following the lines of Nana’s bed, running through her hair. They do not know where they should be. I watch light: sun setting through the blinds and shining in lines against the walls, and we turn off the lights in Nana’s room and sit in the dark to pray. I watch the light through the stained glass of the chapel. The hospital smells like chemicals and piss and plastic. We cannot escape the smell. We come home, leave our shoes in a defeated-looking pile by the door, and shower and try to shake off the smell and the memory. It lingers. My phone does not stop ringing, and I gratefully have the same conversations to all the same loving friends who cannot go a moment longer without asking “How are you?” I answer, I hear the smiles in their silence while I describe God’s faithfulness. We pray together, there on the phone, hundreds of miles away, before I close it shut and go back into the ICU. In every room there is a different story. In the marathon tunnel between the waiting room and Nana’s room I have to pass by the same writhing, hopeless, lonely man who lifts his hands to me and opens his eyes wide at me. I stop. I stand and look. I wave, one hand lifted but kept close to my side so the nurses don’t see. He smiles, relaxes, leans against his pillow and closes his eyes. His hands are still. We eat crap out of vending machines, get to know the women who work in the coffeeshop. We make jokes and recall memories, laughing and wondering why we only bond like this during a crisis. When we are home, we stick close: listening to Sally’s country music even though we hate it, making coffee non-stop, washing dishes we’d normally walk past. I sit late on the front porch steps looking at that single star above my head, on the phone trying to describe the beauty and agony of the day, talking about God’s sovereignty and human brokenness at the same time, wishing we could hold hands as I hear the voice break mid-prayer, and recovering: “Just be with her to comfort her, when I can’t.” 

What is the measure of strength today? After months of praying about who I want to become, I have had the chance to see who I am. I have seen who I’m growing into as a woman, a sister, a daughter, a granddaughter, a niece, a friend, a mother, a lover, a wife, a child of God, a slave to Christ, a leader—and I am becoming a very strong woman.