Tuesday, June 25, 2024
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
God’s waiting room
I don’t get a day like this much. The envelope of my life has been open for 74 years, and for a long time I’ve been pushing that envelope most of the time. These days my shoulders sag a bit, and I walk step by step with care, not to trip or fall.
Last month I had two Mondays in surgery, cataract removal and replacing the lens of one eye one week, one eye the next. Mondays are the best day for me, leaving myself in the hands of experts who showed up for work hours earlier than me, even if I have to be there at 6:30 am. The nurses and techs move smoothly, quick, masks and scrubs in perfect place.
All of this is prayer – my body, slower and theirs, quicker, but everything unhurried, confident in the protocols, patient with us and our fears of the unexpected. We do this once or twice, they have done this thousands of times.
Writing these sentences settles me. Across the way a Mexican man relies on his daughter, and an online translator, to communicate. The nurse and his daughter pass a phone back and forth. Jose was born in December, 1947. He wears his patience like a prayer shawl. I hope this is not resignation, as he fumbles with his medical cards.
I could close my eyes and rest. I do just that.
There is no hurry for me today to finish one thing and begin another. My shoulders relax … I didn’t realize they were tense.
Every week Dr. Sargent does many of these surgeries, week in and week out, for these many years. Her patience with procedures (procedures she helped create) breathes through her skin. She is never in a hurry.
I am the light of the world, says the Lord. Whoever follows me will have the light of life.
I think of something Henri Nouwen said, something he discerned about communion. “We love because we have been loved first,” he said. Mr. Nouwen recognized that true community begins in the ground of solitude:
It is a fallacy to think we grow closer to each other only when we talk, play, or work together. Much growth certainly occurs in such human interactions, but these interactions derive their fruit from solitude, because in solitude, our intimacy with each other is deepened. In solitude we discover each other in a way that physical presence makes difficult if not impossible. In solitude we know a bond with each other that does not depend on words, gestures, or actions, a bond much deeper than our own efforts can create.
In solitude we become aware that we were together before we came together and that life is not a creation of our will but rather an obedient response to the reality of our being united.
“It is solitude,” Nouwen says, “which keeps us in touch with the sustaining love from which we draw strength.”
Great is the Lord, and greatly to be praised. In the city of our God, on the mountain of his holiness. Beautiful for situation, the joy of the whole earth.
(2 Kings 19, Psalm 48, John 8, Matthew 7)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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