The Festering Beneath

It's been a week stay in the hospital for my wife.  Last Sunday she was suffering through a boiling fever and the pain of needles.  Her skin felt as if lava would erupt from her pores.  To watch her lean on a bed of warm towels as the doctor tried to perform a spinal tap was one of the more excruciating moments of our marriage.        You feel completely overwhelmed and helpless fighting something you can only guess lies under the surface.  Having the flu is a diagnosis.  Chicken soup is a remedy.  The festering beneath is something you release control of because you have no choice.

The first release of control became the role reversal.  I did not realize how much my wife serves me throughout the day.  I don't mean that in a chauvinist/sexist way.  We play our roles rather complimentary at home.  To list them in detail would undermine the work we both do, and sometimes I consider it as jobs to do instead of serving the common good of the household.  I do them because what else would I be doing?  My wife sees hers as a way to serve all of us, kids included.  Just the day before she fell ill, she was making Mother's Day gifts for various friends.

The second release was the schedule.  Our oldest completed finals on Monday, so there I was driving madly to Canton with my wife sleeping through a fever.  I pulled next to Fox Hall with my daughter surrounded by a group of softball teammates and friends who all chipped in to bring her various totes, pillows, bags and clothes.  I know the worst part of being bed ridden for a week was not being able to serve her daughter.  No Sunday Open House with cake, no charcoal flamed steak.

The little ones changed their schedules too.  Monday dance class for Milly, a baseball game I didn't attend, shuttling them back and forth from friends to take them to church on Wednesday.  I don't believe Cruz did any of his homework all week.  He cried foul and the unfair card all kids use knowing Milly was not going to school.  He explained to me that since he was above grade level, what was the point of going to class?

Other meetings and agendas were wiped away from the dry erase calendar.  Gardening was put on hold.  Grocery store lists went unpurchased.  Lesson plans at school were printed for the substitutes   My students sent me text messages, FB prayers and questions to predict my return.  No one really mentioned what the atmosphere of the room might have been for a stranger.  While chaos may have reigned, I decided against retaliatory strikes and scare tactics.

Daily routines now became a different sort of commonality.  I watched from the window each morning as my son played kickball with the bus stop kids.  Watched him run to the stop, pick up his book bag and walk on the bus with his 9 year old confidence   He doesn't even look back to wave.  I arrive to my wife, slowly recovering from the unseen.  She couldn't bathe, so the only way to refresh her was with washcloths and generic soap.  I read while she napped, charged my phone to play a series of games, charged the phone again and read some more.  Those first few days weren't conversational.  The exercise of the day was unplugging the i-v monitor, walking her to the bathroom and helping her in bed.  We began to trust in the "couple of days" scenario given by our doctor until a couple of days stretched into the weekend.  I think she cried Saturday when she couldn't come home.

At home, the weariness crept into my personal life.  I ditched my daily devotions.  I figured the prayer and support given by my friends would sustain Delcina throughout.  While I didn't lose faith that he would heal her, I released control of my own responsibility.  While freedom and faith are a choice we all make, God expects you to respond accordingly.  Again, my experiment to rely on only myself only revealed that I'm completely helpless.  Having my wife away, left to my own direction, again proved my undoing.

While sin, reluctance, guilt and excuses form the crust of separation, God readily keeps pursuing.  The moment we say "yes" is not a release from the reign of our hearts.  He uses the people around us to have your daughter over for dinner and ice cream cake, their photos outside of their home could easily be that of my own.  Or they are in the form of visitors who bring balloons, bags of candy and hugs.  Sometimes even the radio plays the perfect song you need while sitting in lunch traffic.  God coordinates and centers all focus on you.  Nothing is wasted.  While my flesh says no, God continues to remind us that, "yes, you can."

Of course when I return to my devotions this morning it's Romans 7:21--...."although I want to do good, evil is right there with me."  Paul goes on to say that there is a war raging against his mind for control of his flesh.  You think the men who wrote the Bible, the disciples, would have been free from these sentiments.   What confounded Paul so much as to write these words generations ago?  Was it the look of a woman?  Was it greed?  Was it patience of the crowds?  I only know that the sin that confronts me daily is not unlike other men.  Each day is a choice.  The flesh is and always will be weak.  It doesn't mean that sin wins, although the devil would have you believe otherwise.  The Great Accuser always stands at bay to snicker at you when you are at your weakest.

I know that the lessons from this week may be forgotten by the end of the month.  The new routine of having my wife home and relaxing will undoubtedly change the landscape.  New challenges will await, and new schedules will undoubtedly be written and abridged.

I skipped church this morning to be with my wife, unbeknownst to me that the church was in me all along.  It's in the scriptures, the smiles of my friends.  It showcased itself in the form of a friend I had not seen in months, walking into the room to chat with us and offer his well wishes.  I gave up on him months ago, but God doesn't erase their story lines.  Church was in that picture of my daughter and her ice cream cake, and it was the church that was behind the camera snapping the picture.

The church was in the heart of a man who walked past a patient's room.  I had seen her bedside.  No visitors.  No look on her face but despair.  I didn't want to look away.  The church in me wanted to intervene.  The church was the steps that brought me into her room, covering the awkwardness of her look at the stranger.  "Hi, my name is Ray.  Can I get you anything?"  The church speaks too, and it moves forward one person at a time.  Awkwardly appealing. 

Written in Dry Erase

These past few days have been a fog of fevers, chills, cloudy skies and scenic landscapes.  Events have occurred in linear fashion, sure, but in the mind, they occur with a sense of immediate calm.  Clarity comes after the moment.  After the breath you take, after the time you take to stop when interrupted, and when you're resting on a couch thinking of all the routes and highways that lead from one direction to another, one decision to the next.

There's been what I have been calling a "calm freaking out" moments this week.  Like when a doctor comes in to tell you he's going to perform a spinal tap on your wife.  Or when I made the terrible decision to self-diagnose my wife's skin infection with my own google-infused research.  I felt the calm freak out when my daughter calls me to warn me about my son's potential meltdown at his first baseball game of the season.  On the drive to get Lisa in Canton, I calmly freaked out talking myself over the bend of the highway, the gas sign on empty, recalling the last time I ran out of gas--wondering who I was going to call to help, what explanation I would use for my predicament.

There hasn't been one special ending of the week that I can pinpoint.  Perhaps you can envision my son stealing the bases at every opportunity during his game (he did not have a meltdown after all), his red socks a streak under the lights.  The dunking of chicken tenders in gravy by my little daughter, with her too short dress and scabby knees.  Some of the week can be describes in the wire tango my wife and I performed every time she had to use the bathroom.  I followed her around with the I-V, the shuffling of my feet in sync with hers in some recovery symphony.

Sounds.  The I-V cart's refill beep.  The call buttons and the patient next to us who used hers like it was a microphone like she was a fill-in for Run DMC. Our room was just outside the elevator, so I used the time to eavesdrop on conversations, employee banter and the wheels of service.  It was the sound of a youth baseball team reciting dugout jokes, or a ball settling into a mitt.  It was the drip of washcloth water on my wife's back.  Copying machine monotony 

Feelings too.  The way my hands absorbed my wife's feet into mine.  Pinching my little one's behind in the elevator like some juvenile secret.  The spasm of a back from the contoured-hindered hospital bed.  The way you hold someone's hand during prayer.  A hug.  A handshake.

Currently my wife is on the downside of a bout with sepsis.  Her hospital stay had been a thorn in an otherwise busy and eventful week for the family.  Lisa, the eldest, finishing her first year of college.  My son's first game.  Team pictures, teaching Sunday school, interviewing team, staff meetings, share group and mowing the grass.  The only commitment I have said no to has probably been my family.  Neglected by a screen--computer, iPod, TV, life.

The infection that spread like red inconvenience wiped clean the agenda written in dry erase.  There was something else at play.  Like a question from a junior high girl at church on how to handle her friend who was fighting bullying and awkwardness of labeling herself as gay (my advice?  Love, be a friend, listen).  It was the coordination of friendship, prayer and love.  One in itself are great.  The three combined are just a fraction of what the Holy Spirit equips us with.

So the week continues.  Much has been learned and there is much to be done.  Sometimes the only thing to do is wait, be still and listen.  I think I'll do mine next to my wife, reading a good book, listening and loving.  Sometimes, that's the most important job of all.