Just Waiting

I am just waiting, sitting in a hospital room chair while my mother dozes in her room. Across from me, the television flashes at whispered volume. (I am only partially following the program as some down under zookeepers talk about testing a Tasmanian devil for allergies.) –Because the real reason for my being and waiting in this place is lying in a hospital gown in the bed beside me. My Mom has placed a wet washcloth over her eyes, and she has a small grey battery powered fan between us on her side table. It dutifully scoops a light breeze onto her lined and flushed face. It does not make the paneled hospital room with its medical accoutrements feel like a beach front oasis. The little fan does not help the real underlying problem at all, as it offers her its small stingy comfort.

My mom is sick, and she is entirely miserable. Her body is fighting a bone infection in her foot. The IV drips industrial grade antibiotics into her veins. She has no energy and less strength. She cannot even stand up by herself to get to the commode. Mom desperately wants to go home. –What she really wants is to go back a week in time to when she was able to move around her own house with her own red four wheeled walker. She wants to go back to her 60 th wedding anniversary dinner that she had last month with my dad. She does not want to be confined to a hospital bed, barely able to lift her arms. She also wants to be able to eat her lunch without shaking and to feel some other emotions other than the big fear and overwhelming depression which are folded behind her eyes like a suffocating blanket.

The fan scatters the June scent of the bouquet of roses that I had brought her, the roses that did not bring her any happiness. She did not even want to look at them. I sit and I wait and I remember the days when Mom would work in her flowerbeds, pruning and weeding and tying up the long hardy canes. Her green plastic watering can pouring out its blue Miracle Grow laced water on the leaves and around the feet of every one of her rosebushes. We need some sort of miracle now. I pray for a miracle. Just a little one. I keep praying for one. I pray some more. I wait. The problem with the modern miracle of antibiotics is that they take a lot of time. They are a slow miracle in a sick and impatient world. But her small barely discernable improvement over the course of the day is only an inch toward healing and there is such a long way yet to go. I just keep waiting.

But I am not waiting alone. When I can’t take it anymore and flee to the hospital bathroom down the yellow hall, God is there. If I get a phone call from my dear husband that I take in the family seating area by the elevators, God is there. If I push my Dad in his wheelchair down to the cafeteria to get some lunch, God is present there too. There is no where that I can go to get away from God’s presence; not under the dark tarp of depression, nor twisting away from the sharp sting of pain, nor the endless hours of waiting and waiting and waiting. God is there, holding my heart in God’s own hands and reminding me that this life on this earth is not all that there is. The love and community of God here on earth is just a Costco sized sample of the real eternity of love that awaits all who believe. We just have to wait for it. Amen.

Article for the Rockford Squire Newspaper 3/7/2024

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