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.