Tuesday, October 16, 2012

Code blue, code blue

I sat the alarm for 6 a.m. this morning. I was going to begin the rest of my life by exercising, walking round the block, preparing to fight the good fight against what has ailed me. I was committed. Sure. Positive. Ready to goooooo.

The second time the alarm went off, at 6:15 a.m., I turned it off for good. I'll start tomorrow. Or the next.

The Apostle Paul was, is, one of my heroes. He planted church after church without benefit of demographic information. But what I take from Paul that is most important is his understanding that to be powerful one must be weak, that on the road marked with suffering, blessed by His name.

Paul uses the theme of weakness often.
"In the same way, the Spirit comes to help our weakness. We don’t know what we should pray, but the Spirit himself pleads our case with unexpressed groans," he writes.

Paul wrote of God telling him, “My grace is enough for you, because power is made perfect in weakness.” So I’ll gladly spend my time bragging about my weaknesses so that Christ’s power can rest on me.
It is the understanding of this theme, and the subsequent turning over what we perceive to be our strengths to him, allowing the control of our lives to be taken from us, pouring out the strengths that keep us from completely surrendering to him like water from a baptismal font that save us in the end.

You can't have a savior if you believe you don't need one. It's that simple, and that irrationally complex at the same time.

I'm certain a head-strong man like Paul had plenty of long one-on-ones with the Lord on walks and rides across the countryside. Heck, Jesus needed those times away from everyone on the mountainside for conversation, also.

There are times I forget my theological shortcomings and my less than glittering track record, instead looking about me and seeing some glint of the trappings of success and think way too much of my efforts.

Then, and only then, I'm afraid, I'm the one who is free falling from miles above the earth. Most of my landings, I'm afraid, are not nearly as graceful either.

I woke Sunday morning in the local hospital about 3:30 a.m. to a blaring voice coming at me like a runaway locomotive, shattering what had been very unfitful sleep.

"Code blue, code blue," I heard over and over.

I rolled over in my too small hospital bed that had been home since having landed in it on Friday morning with what proved to be pneumonia and the touch of COPD brought and did the one thing that I'm thought I could do in that situation. I prayed.

I thought, briefly, about rising from my bed, finding this room where someone had stopped breathing, and going to aide. My stupidity is evident even in the wee dark hours of the morn.

Now, I've heard persons who could lay down prayers like a roofer lays tile, meticulously with great thought and gifts of  word-craft. I've been moved by corporate prayers that were written days in advance, and I've been touched by tiny ones said in quick breaths completely off the cuff.

Me? I pray.  I pray. That's it. That's all. I'm honest. I apply what I know. I do what I can, leaving the bottle uncapped after allowing the words to pour out.

But in this instance, this little moment in a long life, I felt, uh, totally helpless. My prayers seemed as lifeless as I imagined this unnamed, unknown person to be. I shot, then aimed. I recoiled and tried again, hoping and hoping that I hadn't awaked God, that He was already on the job, that this saving but weak prayer wasn't what was needed to move the needle to life.

I prayed, urging the headstrong mule to pull against the plow and the concrete-like field of mortality.

This morning, as I began to write for the first time in a lifetime (four days), I thought about these lyrics from a song by Matthew West:

"I know that I'm not strong enough to be everything that I'm supposed to be. ... right now I'm asking you to be strong enough for both of us."

Lying on messy two-day-old sheets, on a pillow covered in sweat and turmoil, I stared at a ceiling that seemed to stop the prayers, acknowledging I was not strong enough for what He has called me to be. I'm apparently going to suffer in some for or fashion from these scars on my lungs forever. They will be reminders of the consequence of all actions.  I've also discovered that breathing really, really is an important thing.

But if I, we, believe that we are called for such a time as these, then we do what we can and wait for the power from above. That's really what all this is about in the first place or certainly should be.

Sunday after dawn, before the night nurse went home (I believe her name was Lori but Kim and others ), I told her about my prayers. Between coughs, as she arranged things on a computer next to the bed, I told her I felt so inadequate. She smiled thinly and said they could use all the prayers we can muster.

"I never had a night like that," she said. "I don't want to have another. That's not what I got into this for."

I thought she was referring to the code blue, which came about because a patient stopped breathing. But the code blue pulled through. Two persons in a small hospital didn't that night. I never knew. I never prayed.

It's apparent to those who are paying attention, we're all in a code blue of some kind. Doctors. Nurses. Care-givers. Caring prayer partners. The church. The community. The nation. Blue is the color of the day, and all the red states won't change that.

The way out is to understand that God is strong enough for the both of us. For all of us. In our weaknesses, He is strongest. And we leave it right there.

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