Waiting Rooms

I have spent considerable time in waiting rooms with people. In the prep rooms where patients get to wear the lovely hats whose elastic squeezes across their foreheads. Doctors come and go as nurses ask about latex allergies and make sure bracelets match 17 other types of documents. And the ones wearing the hats rest with a mixture of anxiety and bravery. Prayer is part of what we do. Sometimes it halts the surgical machine that is taking one of us where the rest of us can’t go. Just for a moment we hold hands and reach beyond our anxiety toward something else. It seems so childish. Knives and needles and lights and drugs seem so powerful, weapons against something we fear. How can holding hands and praying have any practical value here on this sterile battlefield? Somehow it does. I’ve watched fear evolve to hope. I’ve sensed power there that dwarfs all the mechanical and medical wonders. I’ve always respected doctors. But I rely on prayer.

Just recently, I held a patient’s hand as she waited, hat and all. I listened to the explanations and the doctors’ reassurances. We waited together. And I was terrified. My love was going with them, where I couldn’t go. The silence that I’ve maneuvered through with families was now a lump caught somewhere in my chest. I felt a child, powerless and desperate.

And so I prayed, for my love and for acceptance. Honestly, I cannot believe everything will fit into my categories of approval. I’ve seen and known too much to believe that the ground of all being will use my template for bending moments. I believe in miracles. But I don’t believe they are mine to determine. I have little understanding of such things. So I prayed to be helpful for her. She needed that. It was all I could do.

Time centered down into moments that rushed away from me like a per-Tsunami tide. Too soon they came, worriers to take her. I stood, and with all I knew and had, stopped the rush long enough to pray with her. I don’t remember what I said. I reached with every bit of honesty and strength I had. I kissed her and she was gone.

Today, two weeks since the surgery my love thanked me for praying with her there in that place of terror and hope. And I smiled. We are children, terrified of the dark. I am no less a child, but I am less afraid, not because of results. They are past. But I learned something in that waiting room. We are not alone.