You Can’t Fix It and I Don’t Want You To- An Invitation to my Holy Ground

Those who walk the fields to sow, casting their seed in tears,

    will one day tread those same long rows, amazed by what’s appeared.

Those who weep as they walk

    and plant with sighs

Will return singing with joy,

    when they bring home the harvest.

Psalm 126: 5-6

As a PICU nurse I have all kinds of days. Some are light-hearted, smiling, skipping, “I’m a super-nurse, I just rocked that IV start” days. Some are “holy crap, this is the longest twelve hours of my life” days. Some are “no matter what I try I’m an hour behind on everything and I can’t do anything right” days. Some days I walk off the unit thinking of what to cook for dinner and how my feet hurt and I wonder if I’ll make it home in time to watch the Voice. Some days I slump to the truck thinking of how few hours there are before I have to be there again and how much work eating and bathing seem to be.

Some days are hard days. Hard days I walk off the unit thinking in my mind that I’m really crawling. It doesn’t seem like I should be able to stand up straight with the knife in my chest. It’s all I can do to make it to the truck before the tears come. Not the romantic fat tears that roll down the cheek one at a melodramatic time. No I’m talking the ugly, face-contorting, gasping, heaving sobbing kind. Not sure how I make it home driving like that. And I pray the prayers that sound like shouting and fist-shaking and using lots of profanity. The “WTF, God?!” prayers. Because some days the evil and dark seem to be winning. Because some days it feels like handing your heart over to your patients and families just to be pounded and shredded and trampled and left in the dirt and you just scrape it off the disease-ridden floor and know that tomorrow it’s going to happen all over again.

Some days the weight of my grief is just too much. And it’s part of the job, this grief. And when the grief is heavy it takes away my breath and makes me feel voiceless. It’s all I can do to work up the strength to make that phone call to you. I just need to let it out, the grief, because as hard as it is to speak it’s so much harder to hold it in.

So to all of you, my people, here’s my request: when you get that call, when I’m hysterical and venting and crying heavy all my grief onto your shoulder, just listen and breathe and tell me I’m not alone. Don’t try to fix it. You can’t fix it and I wouldn’t want you to if you could. My grief is Holy Ground. I might be telling you that this Holy Ground sucks and it hurts my feet and I just want to put my shoes back on because my toes are dirty. But I DON’T WANT TO LEAVE IT, this Holy Ground. Not until I’m ready. It’s making me better and stronger and it’s an honor to be there. And I’m inviting you to just be there with me, to help me know I’m not alone there. Be there with me, but don’t try to fix it. Please, don’t breathe a word about fixing it.

 I can do hard things. Not because I’m powerful or strong, but because I have Jesus and He is. Doing hard things is good for my weak self. Sometimes the hard things seem too big for me, but they’re not too big for Jesus. Just point me back at Him. When I’m all out of WTF?! prayers I’ll need to tell Him thank you.

Everyday, every kind of day, when I walk off of the unit I feel deeply honored to get to do what I do. To get to care for those kids and babies is my greatest privilege, one that I am in no way worthy of, that I feel inadequate for each and every day. And if you know me you know that I’m a feeler, I’m a big emotions kind of person. I hope you know this from getting to silly dance or belly laugh with me. But I hope you also get to cry the ugly tears with me. Because there’s a lot of real life in those tears and I want to share real life with you, not the superficial, I’ve-got-my-shit-together, fake kind of life.

Let’s share REAL life. The laughing-and-crying kind.

Welcome to my Holy Ground. Stay awhile with me.

“Grief and pain are like joy and peace; they are not things we should try to snatch from each other. They’re sacred. They are part of each person’s journey. All we can do is offer relief from this fear: I am all alone.

Grief is not something to be fixed. It’s something to be borne, together. And when the time is right, there is always something that is borne from it. After real grief, we are reborn as people with wider and deeper vision and greater compassion for the pain of others. “ –Glennon Doyle Melton

The cross looks different

There’s something different about this cross this year. There’s a huge, golden pipe cross hanging over the altar in the church where I grew up and I’ve always loved it. There is something that induces so much reverence when approaching that altar, that cross. They always cover it with purple cloth all during lent and then on Good Friday they take away the shroud, and everything from the altar, and it hangs bare, victorious.

This Good Friday is something different for me. It’s nothing about the view, it’s the eyes that are different. And instead of the reverence of the altar, the comfort of the beautified, smoothed and gilded version of the cross, I feel my heart longing for the real cross. The one we don’t often think about, because its dirty and uncomfortable and wouldn’t look so good hanging on a chain around our neck. Before the real cross I find I can’t even raise my head, can’t even look upon the blood-soaked wood, with flesh stuck to it and nail holes driven deep. But that cross, the instrument of death, that is the one I am desperate for this Good Friday.

And I think it’s because Death is no longer such an abstract and far-away idea to me, just as well represented by gold as anything else. In this last year I have held Death in my very hands many times. I have watched the last beats of a tiny heart through the fragile chest. I have seen the gasping last breaths and bluing skin. I have watched the eyes go void. I know what the blood pouring really looks like. I see it in again in dreams sometimes. Abuse is no longer an idea but is the real evil that sends babies into my care. 

And no longer is that Friday, that hill, that cross such a hard thing to grasp. And I’m grasping onto it, desperately clinging to that very real cross, the blood-soaked grains digging into my hands. Because I am finally truly desperate for its realness. Because I need it to be real, I need it to be everything that I believe it is, that I know it is. That very real place of death is the only thing that can really mean life. That, the place where Death died, where Jesus took victory over all this evil, where light shines to drive away all of the dark, I need that place to be real, to be present. Because it is the only thing that keeps these lungs filling and emptying, uncrushed by the very real evil my eyes have seen, believing in Life that is more real than death. Life for those babies, for me, for you. After a dark Friday, glorious Sunday comes. 

 I have handed too many babies through that veil that was torn, but my heart fills hopeful because of the one death that defeated Death.  This evil doesn’t win. Jesus is making the sad things untrue. And it all started with that ugly, real, rough-wood, blood-soaked cross. The one where my heart is free. 

The Uncomfortable Year

I have a lot of faith. But I am also afraid a lot, and have no real certainty about anything. I remembered something Father Tom had told me--that the opposite of faith is not doubt, but certainty. Certainty is missing the point entirely. Faith includes noticing the mess, the emptiness and discomfort, and letting it be there until some light returns. ― Anne Lamott

This was an uncomfortable year.

 It started with the waiting. Six months of waiting and wondering. Feeling stuck and stymied in every direction. Being in limbo, no place of my own, spending my time in the room at my parent’s house where all my belongings are stacked in boxes still, or else migrating from air mattress to couch at many friends’ houses. In the waiting I discovered a few things. Probably far less than there were to discover, but I don’t think I was paying a lot of attention. I was distracted by my fears and pride and I think I missed a lot of the things that God was saying in the waiting. I discovered I’m pretty bad at waiting. I also discovered that I have the most beautiful people on God’s green earth in my life and they love me far more than I deserve. Thanks, people. If I look back at that time and subtract the self-pity about waiting, it’s full to the brim of blessed moments, all made possible by not having an agenda.

And then, Haiti. Five months of the uncomfortable year were spent in Haiti. And it wasn’t the living in a bunk room with nine different strangers every week or the heat or the cold showers or the lack of freedom that was uncomfortable. I held a lot of babies. I love those babies. Some of them got better. Some of them, too many, died. Some days I felt like I made a difference and was really heroic. Some days I felt like I had totally muffed everything there was to mess up and it was really a surprise I didn’t kill anybody. I felt a lot of feelings and I thought a lot of thoughts. It might take me a decade to sort through all of that, but I don’t think I need to get hung up on the details. Somewhere in there, in all the feels and thinks, I changed. Things moved and rearranged in me, some stuff torn away, some added. Things refreshed and reawaked, others driven out and abandoned. And I think these eyes I look through see a lot of life differently.

Challenge and change are uncomfortable, and we put an awful lot of stock in being comfortable. But they’re full of learning and growth, and that is LIFE. The real stuff, real LIFE. And I want that, that real life. I feel more cynical about a number of things, some religious and American-cultural stuff that we sometimes make a big deal about. When you see babies die, a lot of babies, some of that stuff just seems like nonsense. I’m less certain of a lot of things. Except for Jesus.  I’m more certain of Jesus. And love. Love never fails.

And these new eyes and changed heart are beautiful. I think they are more like Jesus and that’s the direction I’m aiming for, so that’s good, that’s what matters. But these eyes, this heart full of faces and moments, they make it awfully hard to relate to people these days. There were a lot of things in this uncomfortable year that I can’t really describe to anyone, a place in me only Jesus knows. And I really love sharing with people. It’s uncomfortable to feel like I can’t share all these moments with my people, like I’m estranged and far away.

Stepping off the plane from Haiti, the second time around, I had a call for an interview. A week later I got offered the best job I could have asked for. That was weird, weird awesome, one of those weird awesome things that God likes to do to surprise us. And while my heart still feels like it’s stuck in a developing country across the sea, I’m looking at fancy apartments in Houston and feeling on a totally different planet. In keeping with themes, that’s pretty uncomfortable too. I’ve written before on how it feels to live in between two worlds. Haiti and Houston are two worlds in different solar systems I think. And somehow I belong to both of them, and neither. And as I float, feeling a bit in limbo even as life gets a little more structured around me, I’ve come full circle, yet I’m in such a different place than when I started.

And in this uncomfortable year, I’ve seen the most inspiring beauty and crushing sadness of my entire life. I’ve been changed by what I’ve been shown and I just don’t think I’ll fit back into that original packaging anymore. I think this uncomfortable year is the start of many, many more uncomfortable years, with much more learning, changing, growing.

And I think that’s a beautiful blessing. 

Thin Places

I’m a traveler, from a family of travelers. Our tribe has collectively laid tracks all over the world. My mom and grandmother have had a number of adventures together and I know they would both say one of their favorite places in the world is a scenic, misty island in Scotland called Iona. According to Celtic tradition, Iona is one of the transcendent locations on earth that they refer to as “Thin Places.” It is believed that in these locations the veil between heaven and earth is thinner than elsewhere and one can almost touch the divine there.

Port-au-Prince is pretty dusty and smoggy, far from misty. And while there are fantastic views to be had of beach and mountains, my everyday here is surrounded on all sides by concrete walls. Yet, I understand what the Celts mean by Thin Places, because I feel it here, that palpable spirituality, the lines between earthly and eternal blurring. Maybe it’s because of the all kids we send heavenward on an almost-daily basis and the others who tip-toe up to the very edge and find their way back again, they are bringing heaven in closer. Maybe it’s because the hardest things have a way of dissolving the insignificant parts of life away, bringing soul to surface.  

It seems that you can’t live in the thin places without it having its effect on you, for the veils we hide ourselves under become thin as well. It cuts you open and lays you bare in a most revealing and uncomfortable way. You meet head on every dirty and broken detail of your soul. And this is coming from a person whose every emotion is typically written in bold font across my overly expressive face.

 The force of my emotions the last few weeks has been staggering: joy, pain, frustration. It is exhausting to constantly feel so much, so deeply, and there’s no way around it. You simply can’t be detached and neutral about preserving the lives of children. One evening, totally spent from working and feeling, I thought about what my life would be like if I did something else. Something that didn’t seem like constantly wrestling with Death for possession of these kids. If I just got a job somewhere, where no one’s life ever depended on anything I did and I simply didn’t have to feel so much. And in that pondering I was reminded of just how incredibly blessed I am to be here in this exhausting, terrifying thin place, to serve and feel to my utter limits every day. Because I’m doing something that truly matters, not just now and in this place, but matters eternally.

I’m a dancer and I know how flexibility works. When you stretch to the limit over and over you find that you can go a bit farther each time, your capacity to stretch expands. Every day that I’m poured out to the fullest extent I think the Lord is expanding my capacity to love and serve a little each time. Just maybe my heart is being made larger by all this stretching, more space for the Spirit to fill, a little closer to the heart of God.

A lot of times I don’t like the things that this thin place reveals about me. I’m discovering just how impatient and easily-frustrated I am. I found that the thinnest place for my sanity comes when trying to keep a child unconscious while on the ventilator. Recently we’ve had a few kids who, for varying reasons, needed to be intubated to protect their airway and/ or let their lungs rest and heal. This involves a tube being placed in their trachea and a machine supporting their breathing, and with kids we almost always try to keep them entirely sedated. This is easier said than done given a number of factors, like our limited supply of medications and children’s uncanny ability to metabolize even heavy narcotics like they are water.

All of these factors have contributed to a few shifts in recent weeks where I have spent half of my day straight up wrestling with a groggy kid trying to prevent them from displacing the tube protecting their airway and very life, as they writhe in the discomforting feeling of breathing through a straw, while trying to reach a balance of medications that will keep them calm and asleep. I have discovered that having no less than eight arms and hands is adequate for managing these situations. As I have yet to sprout additional appendages, these are very trying moments indeed. In my mind I’m willing them, “Please relax; let me support you. Sleep and breathe. Don’t fight. Do not be afraid.” When I finally step off the unit, feeling ugly and monstrous and stressed to the max by that little person, I think the Lord is saying something similar to me. He is good and He is on my side.

 I’m incredibly thankful for the beautiful and forgiving people I work with and the ways they lovingly support me when I’m unraveling. I’m thankful for the God who puts me back together again each time, who lets me try again when this thin place shows my failings, who is stretching my capacity to love. I’m thankful for each kiddo that I’ve cared for and opened my heart to. Whether they lived or died, they made my life more blessed forever.

I’m deeply, eternally thankful for the view I get of heaven from this thin place I find myself in. 

Dallas

Somewhere in the airspace over Dallas is where I lose it.

I’m not sure what it is. I do okay in Fort Lauderdale. In Florida everyone is coming and going from the Caribbean and the people are so diverse and I’m still feeling excited about being back in America after three months.

But heading into Dallas is different. Suddenly everyone around me looks like a middle-class American soccer mom or business man. And even though I’m elbow-wrestling with the next person for two inches of arm rest real estate, I suddenly feel miles away from everyone else. And I sit there simultaneously hoping to stay lost in my thoughts without a word spoken to me so I can cling to every memory, and needing to tell someone everything I just saw and did to make it seem more real and less like a dream. But these people are miles away from me. They could never understand the things I walked through, not even the matching-shirted short-term mission team that was on the flight from Haiti. They have no idea. These people who look like my next-door neighbors are aliens to me.

I think Dallas is where my brain feels the split- two worlds that don’t reconcile. Dallas is where I start to feel like it was all a dream. Because if the kid with the iPad and the Starbucks every twenty feet and the immaculate climate-controlled building are all real, how can my malnourished babies and hurting mamas and dusty streets be real too?? It seems like they can’t possibly both be real. And that’s when the tears just come. Even though I was kissing those babies only hours ago, I feel like I’m losing them into that hazy dream-stuff already. And it scares me. Because the memories of those kids are more valuable to me than anything else in this world. I’m trying so hard to hold them tightly and it feels like they are just falling through my fingers.

And to the next person I just look like any other young American with a nice summer tan. They can’t see the frenzy inside as I cling to my treasures- the faces of babies we lost, and of kids that lived, the grief and joy and love defined by those faces. I’m a Texan girl back in Texas, but feeling like a stranger in a strange land.

It’s been a few days. I’m settling into that uncomfortable feeling. The tension of living with this irreconcilable reality. Re-learning how to live with a heart that is divided between two worlds. I’m feeling grateful for the Savior who spans the distance, who is rock-solid and sure in both places. Because if I know nothing else, I know that He is good, He is love, and He is real. Even in Dallas. 

Stained

Some days it’s hard not to give up on people. Not just some people, all of humanity really. It’s hard when my kiddos die of diseases and traumatic accidents and the like, but when the malicious, intentionally evil things seem to keep ruling this place, sometimes you just want to curl up in a ball and ugly-cry your face off. I know, I’ve done it. When yet another gunshot victim, or head-bashed-in-with-a-rock victim, or repeated-stabbing-with-broken-bottles victim comes in.

For me it’s yet another hydrocephalus baby abandoned at the hospital, or even worse, the days-old, spina bifida baby that was brought to us after being found in a dumpster. In the trash. The baby was thrown in the trash. She was thrown away. She’s doing okay now- cleaned up, eating, getting antibiotics and wound care for the lesions covering her body. But thinking about the evil this baby has endured thus far in her little life, it seems too crushing, like an elephant on my chest. Like I said, it’s hard not to give up on people. We’re so ugly and hurtful and hateful, bent and broken and stained by sin, capable of such unspeakable evil.

This is when I really cannot wrap my mind around God’s love. Because sometimes I think He should just squish us. We deserve it. We deserve to be squished. All of us. Especially by Him. Because really even those of us that look okay on the outside, with the manicured lawn and washed windows, on the inside we’re stained too. The selfishness and hatred that lurks in my heart is as dark as baby-trashing. That’s what is really crushing. And He sees it all, even the stains in me that I don’t even know about. He knows them. He sees yours too. We’re all baby-trashers.

“When the time was right, the Anointed One died for all of us who were far from God, powerless, and weak. Now it is rare to find someone willing to die for an upright person, although it’s possible that someone may give up his life for one who is truly good. But think about this: while we were wasting our lives in sin, God revealed His powerful love to us in a tangible display—the Anointed One died for us. As a result, the blood of Jesus has made us right with God now, and certainly we will be rescued by Him from God’s wrath in the future. If we were in the heat of combat with God when His Son reconciled us by laying down His life, then how much more will we be saved by Jesus’ resurrection life? In fact, we stand now reconciled and at peace with God. That’s why we celebrate in God through our Lord Jesus, the Anointed.” Romans 6:6-11

What the what?! Seriously? I have heard the Gospel since I was knee-high to a grasshopper (obviously an expression; I was knee-high to a Harlem Globetrotter by the time I could stand), but it knocks me on my face over and over again. How God could possibly look down on all this mess and not squish us- to still want us and love us and die for us, enduring all of our darkness, so that our stains might be washed clean. To call us not Despised or Evil, but Beloved. It amazes me sometimes the work that God has done in me, to have taken my capacity to love others from thimble-sized to teacup-sized, a work He continues every day despite my failing. But His Love? His Never Stopping, Never Giving Up, Unbreakable, Always and Forever Love? I think the song “The Love of God” describes it my favorite way:

Could we with ink the ocean fill,

And were the skies of parchment made,

Were every stalk on earth a quill,

And every man a scribe by trade;

To write the love of God above

Would drain the ocean dry;

Nor could the scroll contain the whole,

Though stretched from sky to sky

So I guess I’m not going to give up on humanity today. I’m going to dry my eyes and thank my God and keep loving those despicable people. How could I not? He didn’t give up on me. 

Circus Joy

All of my kiddos are special and important, but there are a handful of them that are tattooed on my heart. They have changed me in a way that makes me know my life is more beautiful forever because they are in it. They are the faces I see when I think about what the Kingdom of God is. I would do anything for these kids and they make me realize I can do so little. Most of them have endured unspeakable evil and still have a smile that could light up an entire town.

Last Sunday we were beyond blessed to be gifted with tickets for a few of our patients, all of them those really special, heart-tattoo kind of people, to an outdoor circus here in Port-au-Prince. It sounded like quite an ordeal to take three patients from the spinal cord injury unit and two from pediatrics anywhere, given the combination of their physical states and our available transportation. Challenge accepted.

It took us about thirty minutes to load up. Three half-paralyzed young adults in an X-terra, wound vacs and wheelchairs and all. The circus brought out the creativity in all of us. The three of them have been at the hospital for months without leaving. By golly, we were gonna make this happen.

The rest of us piled into the land-cruiser. Our amazing drivers gingerly guided us around potholes and through the city. We finally arrived, late, and got unloaded, got wheelchairs through the gravel, and were shown to the front row.

If you’ve ever been to a circus, hopefully it was a joyful and exciting experience. If you’ve ever known beautiful and resilient kids who have endured trauma and illness, I’m sure you have been crazy blessed by them. Can I describe to you what the combination is like? I’ll do my best.

This beautiful teenage girl was paralyzed by a gunshot wound to the neck. She was my patient in the pediatric unit for over a month when I first got here and I was privileged to care for her, encouraging her to be strong as she was fighting infections and enduring care for the massive wounds she’d developed. We transferred her to the Spinal Cord Injury unit about a month ago and now I get to just visit her and be her friend, which is the greatest gift of all. She’s getting so much stronger. She smiles often and jokes with her friends on the unit. They tease me about my Kreyol and she speaks slowly and clearly to help me understand. She is one of my most favorite humans ever.

These two young men are in the Spinal Cord Unit, both paralyzed waist down as well. They have been through horrifying trauma, followed by emotional abuse and neglect from others as a result of their physical injuries, yet still have the biggest beaming smiles I’ve ever seen.

This teenage boy has taught me more about God’s faithfulness than maybe anyone else ever. I plan to share much more about his story another day, but for now just know that his life is a complete miracle. I saw him stand on death’s doorstep over and over again, but never give up- not even when we were doing CPR to keep his heart going twice in one week. Even when he was intubated and on a breathing machine he still managed to give me snarky teenager attitude. Just thinking about this boy gives me joy, let alone getting to go with him on a super fun outing for the first time in two months.

 This sweet kiddo is another miracle. He has a crazy wonky congenital heart defect that usually kids usually don’t survive past infancy without cardiac surgery. It is amazing and beautiful that he is alive and he is just the sweetest ever. He was so enraptured by the circus I could have watched his face the entire time.

So all ten of our entourage made our fashionably late entrance and formed our own front row during the sword swallower’s act. Then this happened…

Which I can totally do, can't you? 

Then a little of this…

Then the magician and his lovely assistant "cut an unsuspecting child in half"! I held my breath...

Can you feel the suspense?! 

Then the clowns, who also double as the super buff male acrobat duo did a fantastic routine to the Lion King instrumental soundtrack, made complete by the ominous rain clouds in the background. 

Not sure why you would want to, but they can

Who's the clown now, huh? 

So then the outdoor circus was interrupted when the ominous rain clouds became an actual downpour. We somehow got our entire crew under a tent, via a combination of wheelchair wheelies and piggy-back rides, to wait it out and had a dance party to the music of the impromptu rain parade. 

But the show must go on! And eventually it did just that...

And one of our friends even made it into the show! 

Then this happened. Yes it really did, in all its tight-panted, bedazzled-vested glory. This is the part where I actually almost peed myself from laughing so hard. 

We came up with a lot of names for this act, most of which aren't appropriate to share here. 

Boom, Baby!! That JUST happened! You're welcome. 

This is real life.

 

Peed. Myself. Laughing. 

Then the grand finale fire show. Definitely the way to go out with a bang. And fireworks, which I don't think any of the kids had seen before. Just amazing. 

Best. Night. Ever. 

What a beautiful celebration of life! The joy and laughter and smiles, oh man. I will never forget that night as long as I live. 

When we got back to the hospital and went to see our friends get settled back into the unit, I poked my head into the NICU and saw the look on the nurse's face. A short while later our evening ended with us holding a premature baby while she died. And you know, I wouldn't separate that part of the night from the rest. Because you have to take it all together. The joy and pain, grief and rejoicing. It's the realest, truest life I've ever experienced. And such beauty lies in the contrast, knowing that it is all God's, both sides a perfect illustration of his faithfulness and love towards us. He is the King of life and death; the author of big and small miracles, like boys who live and a night of circus joy.