wonderful work

I am tucking one of the residents in bed for the night.  We've shared a laughter-lush afternoon and evening, and she takes my hand and kisses the top of it as I perch on the edge of her bed and make sure her head is elevated properly. 

"I like you, honey," she informs me--one of many sweet refrains that she frequently addresses to those privileged to spend any amount of time with her. 

"And I love you!" I gush my usual reply, turning her hand over in mine to plant a reciprocal kiss on its wrinkled top. 

"Thank you for kissing my hand," she murmurs.

"You sleep so well, and let me know if you need anything, okay?" 

She reaches her arms up to wrap me in a long hug and says, "I will, honey."

Then I am on my feet and thinking ahead to the work that remains for me to do once I leave the dark bedroom.  I notice, as I cast a parting smile in her direction, that her face is quizzical.  "Is everything okay?" I ask, pausing in the chink of hall light to await her response. 

She hesitates, and then says vaguely, "I need something."

I turn my full attention on her again.  "What can I do for you?"

Her eyes widen and she scootches upright in her bed, declaring with enthusiastic abruptness--as though she's made a compelling discovery--

"I need another hug!" 

---

Every day I see or hear something that more or less kills me with delight, that leaves me like a needle in a haystack of light...

(Mary Oliver)

Waiting

Three months had been lived (what a grace!) since my last checkup, and so I find myself walking down Cherry Street in downtown Grand Rapids yet again.  The wind skips like a fool behind me, shoving my shoulders and ruffling my hair, a young and lively and rakish spring wind.  He swings me around the corner of the brick building to the entrance, and I wave at the familiar red-suspendered figure of the valet as I duck through the automatic doors.   The wind does not stick around: one icy farewell gust, which nonetheless warms my spirit, and he's gone, and I'm wrapped in silence and the chillingly institutional warmth of the building. 

The smell hits me instantly: soap smell, clean and chemical and, to my remembering nose, faintly nauseating.  Each visit it bothers me less. 

I pass by the information desk and round the corner, past the elevator, to the Lack's Infusion Center, where the receptionist is giving directions to a smiling man in a sharp black suit.  He steps back deferentially to let me check in, and she calls my name to mind after a quick glance at her computer screen.  After verifying that my information has undergone no changes since my last appointment, she nods me over to the waiting room, calling to my back, "You look great!" 

The waiting room is a space within a space, like an organ of the body.  The far end of it curves to follow the curve of an exterior staircase, and part of the wall that curves is made of chunky cloudy glass squares, through which it is possible to discern the distorted shadows of people as they climb up or down the staircase.  There are no windows--just that milky glass and, on the other end of the room, an aquarium embedded in the wall with its disinterested culture of fish and bubbles. 

I choose a seat beside the mannequins, three red-lipped pouting stares on tiered shelves behind glass, with silken scarves around their long plastic necks and fashionable wigs covering their shiny bald heads.    They separate me from the nearest human occupants of the waiting room: an old man and two very young healthy-looking boys.  One of the boys catches my eye and I grin at him.  For a few moments we play a little game: he turns away from me, I pretend not to see him, and then--ha!  I catch his eye and grin, and he burrows his face against the old man's arm.  The game ends when a panting gray-haired lady steps into the waiting room and announces, "I'm done.  Let's get out of here."  The three men flurry around her, boys clutching her hands, man solicitously taking her purse from her and offering his arm. When they have left, I open my book and scan a few sentences.

Women in scrubs poke heads into the room and call names in conjunction with the name of a doctor.  People rise when summoned, vanish, and reappear after a few moments with bandages taped to the crook of their arms, or, after a longer timespan, to retrieve their moral support and belongings, shrug into their coats, and depart. 

I find myself regarding the carpet, which consists of huge blocks of various earth tones: green, yellow, brown, red, orange.  It looks to me like the colors are afflicted themselves with some disease, some cancer that has leeched them of brightness.  Suddenly I am seeing disease everywhere.  In the carpet, dull and stained and pulling apart at the seams.  In the mechanical wheezing of the computers across the room from me, which I know from experience are ridden with viruses, slow and outdated and destined for the junkyard before long.  In the glass wall's clouded vision.  In the half-empty styrofoam cup of coffee left to congeal on the puzzle table.  Every chip in the furniture catches my eye, every scratch in the shabby yellow paint.  I remember that the room is cut off from telephone tower reception, and even though I have no reason to call anyone, the thought troubles me.

The music begins to bother me, too.  It is elevator music, waiting room music, aimless and anesthetizing, empty technique.  It does not invite a response--if anything, it encourages disengagement of the emotions, lulls you into not-feeling. 

Heaps of magazines cover coffee tables and bulge out of shelves on the walls.  Two circular tables stand supporting unfinished puzzles.  I think about all the fingertips that have marked them, and about all the sets of brains that have regarded them.  All the lives on hold, penned up in this little waiting room.

Memories of previous visits always descend upon me eventually in this room.  First always is the image of one very ill woman who had been wheeled into the waiting room soon after I and my parents had arrived for our first consultation with my doctor, and the sick fright I had felt as I saw her piteous hollow unforgettable face--how like a death's head it looked when she smiled.  I don't let myself wonder about her long, a year since our paths crossed, because I think it unlikely that she is yet living, and that assumption twists my gut with a sort of baffled survivor's guilt.

Then I am remembering my first morning of chemo, a week after my discharge from the hospital, sitting with my father and my friend and the man I love on that very couch where today the old man with the gray ponytail is dozing alone.  I had been so relieved to have a conversation with a woman who was waiting for her mother to emerge from the chemo ward, to divert my mind by entering someone else's trouble, distancing myself from my own imminent treatment.  I remember how it hurt to sit and stand when my name was called, each movement tearing at the stitches that still zippered my stomach together.

The recollection has me jumping to my feet,  relieved at how easy and good the gesture feels, striding to the puzzle table, where this morbid bent in my brain has me dwelling on the--is it irony?--of placing enormous difficult puzzles in a waiting room to divert people who are grappling with enormous difficult problems in their lives.  And that awful artwork on the wall, disembodied hands releasing bright balloons into a blue sky.  Letting Go it is labeled, and seems to preside over those partially finished jigsaws and their jumbled unrealized potential. 

It happens every time I return here: this recognition that no matter how long I live, I will never be able to sit in this or any other waiting room and feel like I have done all I can.   The spectre of unfinished business will ever haunt me in places like this, spaces that bring me face to face with the fact of my finitude.  It is good for me to remember this.  It makes me weigh the potentials of my life in the scales of eternity.  It forces me to prioritize again, to shake my heart back into perspective.  And it drives me back to the Alpha and Omega, the only One who can give me grace to run my race, fight the good fight, keep the faith. 

Always I end up lost in prayer, waiting on God in the waiting room.

The wind is waiting for me as I stride back outdoors after my checkup and I draw in deep lungfuls of spring air as we walk back up Cherry Street towards my parked car, where I put the key in the ignition and resume things for as long as they are there for me to resume.  This side of Eden, resuming and faithfully resuming are my task.  I leave perfection to heaven.

"Forbid my vision / To take itself for a curious angel..."

A few nights ago I had a long visit with some work friends.  For awhile, our conversation engaged the topic of what God's purpose could possibly be in permitting disabilities to exist.  The three of us work as aides in a home for adults with severe mental and physical disabilities, so the topic is one we have each had cause to ponder in a very personal way.

My brain fills with a rush of reactions all at once whenever the idea of God's tolerance of disability is broached in my presence. I feel the need to point out that that question is just one tiny branch of the immense question of why God tolerates any distortion of His Creation at all...including the disabilities that we all suffer in this fallen world. And then I am bursting with reasons I am so glad that God has placed these people on earth, in my life, as I reflect on what they have taught me about myself, about God, and about how to live...and also as I fondly picture my friendships with each one.

I have not struggled as much with the theodicy inherent in any discussion of the disabled population as my coworkers have.  This does not mean that I do not sorrow for the way sin manifests itself in the world; merely that I can entrust its outcomes to God.  I recognize that some would see this response as taking an easy way out of a difficult problem, but I disagree.  I believe that bitterness is easy. Unbelief is easy. Despair is easy.  Faith in God is hard. Believing that He is Who He claims to be, in the face of evil, is not easy. So when someone asks why God allows children to be born with mental and physical impairments, I do not say it carelessly, but I do say confidently, "If He does it, it is for good."  Perhaps I'll flesh that topic out more thoroughly later--you can't explain a theodicy satisfactorily in a paragraph (indeed, perhaps you can't explain a theodicy "satisfactorily" at all!  Terms are slippery!).  For now, leaving that difficult issue in God's hands, I can still affirm the powerful personal impact these people have had on me. 

None of us right now is what God created us to be. Working with disabled people has given me insight into what I myself must look like against heavenly standards. My physical body is ridden with the effects of sin.  My strength and stamina and coordination (even at my best) have definite constraints, I am vulnerable to disease and injury, and what mobility and powers I do possess are sure to be lost over time.  The same sort of impediments afflict me mentally: my thoughts are cloudy, and I am limited in how much I can learn, and in how to use that learning.  I am mostly and most disproportionately consumed with myself...I lack true perspective.  And I am oblivious, for the most part, to how deeply disabled I am!  Blind even to the fact of my blindness.  These impairments affect my behavior, leading me to commit absurd follies and grievous offenses that defy the good law that God has set in place (for my happiness).  When I see these impairments from which I suffer "writ large" in the persons with whom I work, I realize that what separates me from them is the degree of impairment, not the fact of it.

And that leads me to praise!  Like these people, I am not left to live out my days in neglect and suffering.  Like them, I still have within me the ability to experience the delights of this created world, to interact mentally and emotionally and spiritually with God and with others...even if those experiences and interactions are flawed and curbed by my disabilities.  And, like them, I have been given more than I could ever have known to ask for if left to myself--more than I could ever have imagined.  I have a Caretaker, and He not only meets my barest human needs, He also daily lavishes love and attention upon me, gives my life richness and purpose, and helps me to better myself.  He is divinely patient with my weaknesses and failings.  In becoming acquainted with the residents under my care, I have been ushered into an infinitely humbling and breathlessly heroic vision of what God's love means.  The idea of providence has taken on a dazzling luster.  I cannot but praise Him when I think of it. 

Of course, having experienced God's tender provision in my own life, I feel compelled to communicate what I've been given, as much as I am able, to those beneath my care.  In this way, they have assisted me by inspiring me to godliness.  Not a day passes without these dear people challenging me to tend the fruits of the Spirit in the garden of my soul.   They give me a thousand opportunities to practice love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self control.  And by practice, I mean practice, because (they daily remind me) such graces do not come easily to my disabled heart!  Things like training my touch to a patient tenderness while assisting with cares that could be executed faster if done with more roughness, less compassion.  Or striving to be a tranquil presence that warms them with care and attention, when I would rather spend my time conversing with staff members or getting ahead on my chores. Responding to even the most trying situations with composure and grace and cheerfulness rather than frustration and rudeness and ill will.  Being faithful in the little things--food quality and housekeeping--that contribute to making the building feel like a home, when it would be so easy to cut corners and let things slide.  Each day spent with them shows me how lacking my care for them is in comparison to how I have myself been cared for, and it drives me to seek to serve them better. 

Not to mention, they are simply delightful human beings! There is intrinsic pleasure that results from learning to communicate with them, knowing what makes them happy or upset, what causes them discomfort and how to alleviate it.  Also in seeing them respond to my attention and interest with affection, realizing that they recognize and respond to my voice, and arriving at a relational level where we even have inside jokes and practices.  Along with all they have taught me, I am blessed to be able to also claim them as friends. 

So, fallen disabled human being that I am, I am grateful that God has filled my life with these other fallen disabled human beings.  I hate to witness the effects of their impairments, which (like the impairments themselves) are often so much more severe than the effects of my own.  I yearn for their future restoration, even as I yearn for my own future restoration. 

In the meantime, I love them and praise God for them. 

I am convinced that this world is better because they are in it. 

I always find myself returning to Richard Wilbur's The Eye, particularly Part II.  I am ever claiming it as a prayer for my own life, and it certainly is an appropriate way to end this particular rumination. 

Preserve us, Lucy,

From the eye's nonsense, you by whom

Benighted Dante was beheld,

To whom he was beholden.

If the salesman's head

Rolls on the seat-back of the 'bus

In ugly sleep, his open mouth

Banjo-strung with spittle,

Forbid my vision

To take itself for a curious angel.

Remind me that I am here in body,

A passenger, and rumpled.

Charge me to see

In all bodies the beat of spirit,

Not merely in the tout en l'air

Or double pike with layout

But in the strong,

Shouldering gait of the legless man,

The calm walk of the blind young woman

Whose cane touches the curbstone.

Correct my view

That the far mountain is much diminished,

That the fovea is prime composer,

That the lid's closure frees me.

Let me be touched

By the alien hands of love forever,

That this eye not be folly's loophole

But giver of due regard.