Things God Allows

There is something that God does for me before a crisis–when I can see the giant, dark waves coming and feel the sand beginning to wash out beneath me. He allows me, always, a brief time with friends. The quickest of rejuvenations–not weeks on a beach, not even lingering dinners–just quick reminders: You also have this.

You have someone who smiles the second they see you. Who rearranges their schedule, welcomes you with snacks, wakes their slumbering kids, sits everyone in comfy chairs and lets you, for a moment, forget that offshore the waves are rising, and soon enough, they will be crashing.

I did that in August–sat in my favorite chair in my friend Lynn’s house, some 260 miles from mine. I petted her dog, joked with her kids, ate a donut.

Then it was time to go home.

I didn’t want to, really. Major medical crisis #4 was at home. I wanted to stay away, to wander around Atlanta, to go to Lenox Square–just as I had in college–and look idly at every single purse in Macy’s. To stand there and  feel their leather, to peer inside, looking for those with quality liners–because a cheerful purse lining is one of life’s unnoticed and unmentioned little pleasures. I wanted to eat a pretzel and people watch. To distract myself with the whorls of people and the chortling children.

I was still deciding–home or the mall?–as Lynn walked me to my car. “Go home and go to the Y–walking at the Y will be better for you than looking at purses,” she said, patting the roof of the car.

And I obeyed.

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I tell Greg that I wish I knew how many times I have ridden home from Atlanta, taken I-75 to US-82. I want a count because I love that drive–a few times, I have even taken it as a 500-mile day trip, running up to visit museums. For me, those miles are full of good memories with family and friends–now, almost a half a century’s worth. There are places between Cordele and Tifton where there is big sky. There are cows on low hills. There is my favorite pond near Alapaha–at sunset, with the wading birds and cypress trees, there’s almost nowhere prettier.

Sometimes I just pull over and let myself look.

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That Sunday, traffic was light. As I sang along with Jason Aldean on Pandora and drank my Dr. Pepper, I suddenly thought, “I am driving 70 MPH toward a place that I do not want to go.“

But the reprieve, I knew, was over.

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I teach school–I spend seven hours a day with teens who have not yet found their paths. They are still young enough to say things like, “I will never have a boss,” to think that eight dollars an hour is a lot of money, to believe that a fast car will bring them happiness.

But adulthood–especially when combined with tragedy, as most adulthoods are–will blow those illusions away. Even those we need,  the things we want to believe.

That’s amazing, isn’t it? We adults routinely do things we do not want to do, things that are so difficult. We go back to school at night; we relocate to help sick parents; we put our own dreams on hold for others; we face horrors–from bankruptcies to the deaths of children, things that are so terrible that we cannot even put them into words. 

We face things that we know are going to break and destroy us–but we keep our faces forward and we keep walking.

That is what it’s so insane to me about the Christian faith: we can continue to walk.

There’s no need to run away when we know that God is with us–when we have been assured that He is in the bottom of the ocean, on the rocky cliffs, in the low valleys–when we know to the very core of our souls that we are never alone, well, then we can walk.

(Note: I hate that some in the modern church make it seem like there is an epiphany-level of Christianity where everyone automatically feels perfect/better. Because I have never felt whole or complete, like my “God-shaped hole” (the one that the song says is “in all of us”) has been entirely filled. And the fact that I didn’t feel like holding my head high and shoulders back used to bother me–but I now see God also values the walking itself.)

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There was so much blue sky that day. I love a blue sky, white cloud day, and on that drive home, I felt fed by it. Like God was saying, “Remember, I do this,” like He was painting pictures for me to remember on the long days in the hospital, letting me store up comfort for the walk I didn’t want to take.

There is, after all, nothing in us that wants to spend days 39-45 in a hospital. Greg doesn’t want to have his sternum “sawed in half” now–or again in twelve years. We don’t want to miss work. We don’t want the bills or the stress or the sorrow or the pain.

But in three days, we will be in our third hospital. The surgery will go better than expected. In ICU, he will do so well that the doctors and nurses will marvel, as they always do.  We will watch Fox News and I will make sure the nurses wash their hands and give him good pain medication and the CNAs bring him ice, and I will ask the custodians about their grandchildren and the cafeteria workers about their kids and thank the orderlies when they bring me blankets. 

When I am sad, when it is all just too much, I will go to the lobby where the exultant new mothers sit in wheelchairs cradling their sweet babies, waiting to go home. I will watch their husbands strap the tiny babies’ carseats in, then turn and carefully help their wives into the cars.

Again and again, I will watch as new families leave the hospital, and I will be so happy–because my God in his mercy allows that, too.