Sore, bandaged hands

I am home with sore and bandaged hand wondering if it was worth it because I can’t tell yet (any more than I can tell after all my herceptin sessions if I’m cured. I had my next to last on Tuesday. Almost finished. Yay!) The procedure was over in five minutes. That was the easy part. The hard part was six needles straight into the nerve and the angry reawakening of those disturbed nerves later in the morning. But the worst is over. I’m already typing with both hands. I won’t think about the next surgery in June. Except to wonder if the surgeon will find a more attentive nurse. I was awake through everything to hear him quietly call her on her mistakes, “I said no springer. I have no use for that.” I have til June to research what a springer does. Maybe I don’t want to know.

Instead, I think about how much our culture trains us toward faith. I walk willingly into a room with medical paraphernalia and wait patiently for some stranger I’ve just met to poke me painfully with needles, snip away at my bones, and tell me to come back for more in six weeks’ time. I think in those waiting moments that I could just get up and walk away. But I don’t. I trust this system that packs the little waiting room “against the green wall,” as the receptionist put it—unfortunate terms. There are no free chairs, and Robert and I go back down to the first floor for coffee. Back in the waiting room, where family members, including Robert, give up their chairs for the patients waiting to be called, two sets of friends find each other unexpectedly, “Hey, what are you doing here? I didn’t know you were coming!” I greet my cousin in law. We notice the young girl, there alone, her face pale with fear. She has just enough faith to sit and wait her turn.

God gives us all these ways to teach us trust. The sun keeps coming up, and gravity always keeps our feet on the ground. Our mothers always love us (this is his plan; it can be thwarted), food always tastes good, and doctors always make things better. We know these things should always happen. And when they don’t, we know there’s something wrong; the system fails. We sense it should not be this way.

We learn of trust, and trust being broken. Life is a school to teach such things. And hopefully, if God has his way, there will also be lessons of trust rekindled, of sacrifices made, of the innocent defended and the guilty forgiven, of evil overturned and redeemed, so that we can know such things are possible. So that we would wonder if there’s not something to trust beyond ourselves and the limits of our universe.

Because the universe does not forgive. There’s never grace in Nature. A lion always eats the helpless lamb unless it’s trained and taught to trust a man. Or woman.

But doctors and mothers and gravity point to God. And since that was not enough, Jesus came and put into words the silent yearning of God’s heart, “For God so loved…” And now we know that in all things we can trust and give thanks. In death, certainly, but also in life, in the small things, like needles into nerves and sore, bandaged hands.