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| | So the past few entries have been full of all that occupies our leisure time, the external. Finally I shall delve into the part of my life that leaves me bare and vulnerable for all who choose to see. I guess I should preface this entry by re-iterating my heart's cry to God that he would give me more love. I need more love. I want more love. I want to be able to love all people regardless of anything other than how God wants me to love all people.I want to know when to just hold someone and lovingly listen and when to be able to look someone in the eye and say "you need to change..." while at the same time loving them enough to give my life for them or live my life in sacrifice to them.
I don't have that kind of love. I want to see someone exactly as God sees me. Which would be frightfully scary if He viewed me the same way I all too often view others. It's not that I don't give my time to others, it's not that I have more time to give to others than I already give it's more that I want to know that the time I do give is not motivated by anything selfish inside me and that I would not feel guilty for all the others out there that are vying, begging, pleading, screaming for my time. I want to die knowing that I gave my all and that all I gave was to whom God willed. I find myself jealous and struggling to have more quality time with my son and husband and yet I am becoming increasingly aware that time is such a precious commodity that is fleeting and there are other people God has in my life to minister to.
So here I am sitting at work 1:46 am typing to you as I sit at my patients bedside. She is 42 years old with Multiple Sclerosis (deterioration of her muscles in a nutshell) She has lost full mobility in her hands and arms, has basically no control over her head neck and legs. If not for 24 hour care she would lie in her own waste.She has a tracheotomy, a feeding tube, and requires help simply to scratch an itch. I recently cared for her mother who at 75 is a lung cancer survivor. I am struck by the fact that I still have the nerve to complain about anything. Yet this isn't an isolated case, anyone who reads this story has one of their own; maybe many, to share as well.
In my humanity I struggle as my flesh rages and wars against my desire for obedience to God. Obedience with joy. There are so many things I am grateful for. God is doing such a mighty work in our lives right now. But it hurts. He is stretching me and it hurts. I am in agony right now. I don't like the pain, in fact I writhe against it. But praise God He loves me enough to let me hurt, and cry, and grow.
My story begins in South St. Louis June 2007. I am preparing to leave for work. Once more I find myself crying on David's shoulder as I beg God for an excuse to not leave my family for the alternative of caring for my most dreaded patient. Dragging my feet the clock finally pressures me to leave the comfort of my home and go to this, this house. A house where love fails to exist a house where love has never existed except for in a very worldly twisted and grotesque definition of the word "love". A place where three marriage vows have been broken, where children have been beaten, profanities proclaimed. A place where I entered and the Spirit of God would literally feel like it was being choked out of me. I have never had to endure so many hours of Spritual Warfare as that. Not even my Wash-U debate with the Gay Panel and a predominately alternative lifestyle ....audience; as hostile as they were, even they didn't hold a candle to the oppression I felt or the tears I cried in this house. My patient was bitter, she mocked and made fun of me. She had no use for God or anything to do with Him. She had a nephew that said things to me that made my skin crawl. She had a son that hated her almost as much as she hated him. She had a family full of members anxious for her to die just so they could claim their part of the inheritance.
Yet, this most unlovable of women, God wanted me to love. This place I dreaded, God wanted me to go to. So I arrived and I interrupt the report when I hear that our patient had been saying the Lord's prayer. The nurse asks if I am a Christian and then proceeds to tell me that the patient had professed her need of a Saviour, confessed her sins, and has been crying out to God ever since. Tears start pouring down my face as she relays how at least six of the other nurses had been witnessing to her as well. The nurse then encourages me to go into her room and feel the peace that now resides in that place, after we pray, I head back to the room. There before me lies a woman peaceful, for the first time I've seen her this way in 7 months. She takes my hand and I begin with tears streaming down stroking her face loving her, telling her about Jesus, praying, reading scripture, and singing praises to God. She is blessing me in the place of cursing, she is crying, praying, repeating the things I am telling her. At one point in the night we had this sweet moment where she woke up crying from a dream. I quickly took her hand and asked what was wrong , to which she responded "They won't let me in, I don't have the right shoes", I started crying and re-assured her that the beauty of grace and salvation is going to the cross with nothing, going just as we are. She went back to sleep
Next shift, I arrive and find she has slipped back to old ways cursing, complaining, seeing dead people, fitful, hallucinating. I am trying to love her, love her despite herself, and continue to witness. Finally as I am trying to feed her she has been little by little trying to annoy me, mock me, then she takes a hold of my hair and yanks it. I run out of the room crying, grab my cell phone and as I am justifying my call to the office requesting they not send me back. The voice of God speaks to me so clearly that "I need to stop trying to love people in my own strength" I sank, convicted, I saw an image of her lying there and realized that if not for the love of God that was me, that vile woman lying there, bitter, and unlovely was me. There was, has, and never will be anything I do that will merit anything better than her worst effort in life but for the love of God. I melted, cried out to God for His strength and received a beautiful illustration of His power made perfect through my weakness. Because in that instant a love so indescribable flooded me overwhelmed me and I ran right back into that room and loved on her, kissed on her, and professed Jesus Christ as Lord.
The next few shifts with her where bittersweet as I continued to love her, pray over her and profess Christ to her. She drifted in and out of reality accepting the things which I spoke to her and sometimes being so far from reality she had no idea who I was or why I was there. Unfortunately the last night I spent with her she was delirious. Her daughter-in-law informed one of our employees that our company cost too much money (even though it was the patient's money paying for our care) and that not another penny was going to be spent, in fact that money was going to put their grandkids through college among other things. And so it was, our shifts were cancelled and she was put in a facility where she died the next week.
A month later I get a call from our adoption agency that there is a birth mom who is in a domestic violence situation and needs a place to live. She has a 1 year-old boy and is 7 months pregnant. She is the second birth mom we've housed, our last experience wasn't so positive. David prays about it and decides we need to do this. So we accept. In preparation for her arrival I am dealing with a flood of emotions. Tyler has been going through a lot of separation anxiety lately, crying as I leave for work, crying when we leave him only for a couple hours, not wanting to spend the night with my grandparents or stay with David's parents. So the guilt is building that I will be spending less time with him as I care for these people in addition to having a full work load- 40 hours over the next four nights. More love God, I need more love.
Tomorrow is day five of this experience and as I soaked in the tub I reflected over the past week. It is a strange dichotomy having a woman living in your home about to give birth to a baby she cannot/does not want to keep while I am painfully reminded by my cycle that I am not carrying a baby that I desperately want to have and can't afford to adopt the baby she does not want.
As I am dealing with this range of emotions I arrived at work to relieve someone that I have always had trouble accepting. She never seemed "for real". Have you ever met those people who are always happy always caring about you, always happy to be at work loving what they do, even when what they do is caring for vile, bitter, dying, people? And you're like this has to be superficial, they can't be like this all the time, they can't be "for real"? Well there she was happy and bubbly not trying to rush home after a 12hour shift, asking me how my life was, and there I was having no time with my husband hurting emotionally by my barrenness over the past several years, mourning the loss of the past two pregnancies, a little stressed by the hiccup in our routine and yet wanting peace with where God has me. My complaint isn't because I feel like I am supposed to be somewhere else in my life as much as it is a general mourning over the sinful state of life and lack of contentment at times on my part.
What I actually mumbled was something like "doing great, staying busy, have a birth mom with us, David's still is school, Tyler is doing well." She could have said that's great and left, it is what I expected, but she wanted more info. I delved a little deeper into my life, and she pried a little more, and then her life story unfolded and all my defenses came tumbling down. She was an only daughter of five with a deaf mom and an alcoholic father who beat them all regularly, growing up in a cold water flat shared with rats and roaches. The only time there was ever steak in the house is when her father emptied his pockets and sent her down to the meat mkt. to get a steak to cover the bruises left on her deaf mother's eyes.
She vividly remembers a time when she was twelve, coming home with her father on top of her youngest brother who by that time had turned blue. Her father was so drunk he didn't realize his son couldn't breathe. In an attempt to save her brother's life she mustered all the strength and courage she had and plowed into her father knocking her brother free. Her father in rage beat her to a bloody pulp as the rest of the family remained paralyzed by fear. When he was finally done he got up and commanded that she never interfere again with the disciplining of his children.Unable to get up she painfully crawled away. As always he had no recollection of what transpired the morning after his stupor had worn off. For a year she couldn't smile without her lip splitting back open and she now has a visible scar from that incident.Another time he knocked her so hard she landed in the next room of the house. To this day she can hear the typically loud sounds that eminate from someone who is deaf and said that when her father was beating her mother she would let out a bone-chilling scream that would make your blood curdle.
At 17 she left the home of her father who told her he never wanted a daughter anyway and that she was dead to him. This was just a verbal confirmation of what she already knew by the fact that he always had beaten her the hardest. She walked away and never looked back. But her story does not end there. At some point along the way God reached out and she responded to the call.
One day her mom goes into the hospital, the next day her father goes in, the following day her daughter is diagnosed with cancer. As a struggling divorcee trying to scrape together enough to pay the bills and raise her family, she takes her mother in to care for her and show her a lifestyle alternative.Due to her new love of God and trust in Him she was prompted by the need of forgiveness to go and talk to her dad. She walked in to see a bitter haggard old man wreaking as he lay in his own urine. He had no idea who she was. She introduced herself her intention for coming proclaimed her forgiveness and pleaded with him to make things right with God. That was to be the last time she would see him alive. To her dismay after her father was released from the hospital, her mom went back, back to the filth, the rats, the roaches and the beatings. Finally a neighbor responding to the screams called the police. Her mother was placed on hospice, her father institutionalized eventually going on hospice. They both died shortly thereafter.
She sat at the funeral on one side the dis-inherited with her youngest brother, her four remaining brothers on the opposite side, all alcoholics and hostile towards her. At the end she requested the casket remain open, approached, gave all remaining baggage and forgiveness, prayed that he had made things right and than looked up to have her brother echo in her ear the reminder that she was the unwanted daughter. She acknowledged this, knowing her value came from the Lord.
As if all of this wasn't enough to jolt me she went on to talk about how much she loves this job, she loves the people the opportunities to love them. And it is true, I have never witnessed her coming to a patient's home without a goodie bag for them and a day full of fun and laughter planned. She has never hurried off. She visits patients on her off time, on her lunch breaks, from her other job. She visited our patient even after the family took us off the schedule. She went to the funeral with packets prepared for all the members, witnessed to them and shared the love she had for this unlovely lady. She never complains about patients, she calls them all her friends. She fills in for people at work no questions asked. She is truly a delight and everyone loves her. So it is for real, it is the real deal, the real and genuine love that only comes from knowing the Lord.
As her story came to an end, she apologized for sharing something she rarely shares with others, commenting that there must be a reason, all I could do was smile and nod, knowing in my heart there was a reason. And then pausing she looked me in the eye and locked my gaze it was to be the final arrow once again piercing my soul "You know Heather, there are a lot of "I's" in the world and not enough "we's". The rest of what she told me will remain between me and her, but suffice it to say she left in traditional fashion not hurried, 45 minutes after clocking out with a smile on her face and joy in her heart. I stood in the door crying and thanking God.
| | | Posted 8/24/2007 5:48 AM - 2 comments
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