Emotion

Emotion

People have often told me “I could never do that” when I tell them I’m an ER nurse. I need to start asking them what they mean. Because I’m starting to wonder if they also criticize me for the same qualities I need in order to accomplish my job.

I have to push past my emotion to make a decision and complete an action. I have to watch people suffer and even die without being ruled by emotions. I have to get extremely angry at seeing a teenager slap his mother and continue to care for him as my patient. I give narcotics to drug abusers and have to treat them with patient satisfaction scores in mind. Their rating of my interaction with them could cause me to lose my job. I have to stick needles into babies while they and their parents cry, but I’m doing it to save their life.

I’ve been called cold. Painful love is not cold. Painful love lies awake night after night contemplating a decision. Painful love endures with tolerance but ends a relationship when it becomes harmful. Painful love lives in truth.

My actions must be based on truth and my feelings must stem from truth. Where I struggle is to find healing in my fear and pain. How do I come to work after watching a child die, a man lose his wife, a woman see her husband lose his memory, a mother lose her unborn child, a teenager attempt suicide? Day after day after day?

How do I smile and promote patient satisfaction when I feel the pain of the people I cannot truly comfort?

Sometimes I do feel jaded, even dead inside. But do not assume that I do not feel something because my response is not what yours would be.

All of the earth is groaning. My heart and body are groaning. I am waiting eagerly for the glory that will far exceed the present suffering.

Romans 8: 18-39

Undivided Devotion

Google search.

Addiction? Finances? Childrearing? Definitely marriage. You’ll find books, sermons, workshops, even conferences devoted to helping Christians in the mentioned areas. Wading through the sheer amount of material can be overwhelming, especially in an attempt to determine whether the philosophy is truly Biblical.

Single women? Sure, plenty of resources available to the curious, perhaps desperate seeker. And, the inquirer certainly has a wide range of options with which to align her thinking. If she knows what she wants, she can find a view that supports it and even directs her in achieving her dream. Titles like “From stalemate to soulmate”, “Married in a year”, or “Mistakes singles make” appeal to the lonely college graduate whose only goal with school was an Mrs. degree.

On the other hand, the independent career woman may be drawn to internet support groups for Christian feminists. I don’t intend to debate gender roles in the church at this point. I’m more concerned about a specific mindset often presented to and easily adopted by young Christian women.

I find it interesting to note that most single women find their identity in terms of their relationship to men. “I’m single and looking for a man” contrasted with “I’m single and don’t need a man”. I know that I didn’t want to wear either T-shirt, but struggled to find a middle ground. The question for me was not really in relation to sexuality but more of a desire to know my boundaries of submission and authority. A woman’s God-ordained nature is to look to men for leadership.

I had a hard time finding a well-developed Biblical position on the function of a single woman. Early church culture created circumstances for a woman to live at home and be under her father’s provision and authority until marriage. She didn’t really have the option of financial independence. Leaving home for college and then working to support myself challenged my beliefs and personal relationship with God. I literally remember the epiphany of realizing that I could believe something different than my father and still be right with God.

Although never verbalized, my thinking during childhood was probably that I would meet a guy in college and get married right after. From Daddy’s spiritual authority to my husband’s. And this scenario is true for many ladies. Nothing wrong with it. But it doesn’t happen for most.

I remember years of feeling alone. Drifting in a deep ocean of confusion. There is no worse feeling than being in a position of wondering if a single person in the world would know or care if you fell into sin.

In the midst of these circumstances, God directed me to an amazing church where my eyes were opened to the role of the body of Christ in my spiritual growth. I started realizing that I didn’t have to do it all alone. I had spiritual authority, leadership, and encouragement in the church.

I often felt frustrated with having to make decisions that I would have much rather let someone else make for me. Not only on spiritual matters, but also every day practical needs. There’s a narrow equilibrium on the continuum from lazy and overly dependent to prideful independence.

I want to challenge all single women to discipline themselves to develop their personal theology. You need to know what you believe so that you can join a church where you know you will be under good spiritual leadership. Another side of my challenge would be to plan on supporting yourself with a job. Don’t assume you’ll get married. Prepare to live as a single woman who is financially independent and spiritually submissive to a local church. I do not see this idea taught in churches. But I think the idea that “you’ll grow up and get married” creates the wrong view of both singleness and marriage for many people.

So am I against marriage? Not at all. I’m against the wrong view of marriage.

I am saying this for your own good, not to restrict you, but that you may live in a right way in undivided devotion to the Lord. (1 Cor. 7:35).

The purpose of marriage is devotion to God. As is the purpose of singleness.

An unmarried woman should have a high view of God, but also of God’s sovereignty in her life. (Nancy Wilson).

God will ordain the circumstances you need for sanctification. But you are responsible for your choice of spiritual leadership.

Submission means to arrange under. When feminists attack the idea of submission, they are overlooking the fact that it is not top-down. It cannot be forced – it’s a heart position taken by the follower. If you blindly say “I do” you put yourself at risk to waking up next to someone you resent.  And while you may have a fair finger to point, several will be pointing back at you.

All Christian women have identity and acceptance in Christ. Differences between those single or married are primarily in their direct spiritual authority. A woman’s call to submission is not a position of bondage. She exercises her freedom to make an informed choice. 

Restless

Always moving , always wanting,

Never finding, never done.

Always searching, never comfort

In a place I can’t call home.

Filled with faces

Happy faces

Biggest smiles

But without eyes

Surrounded by the prayers and wishes

Of a group in harmony

But I can’t join in the worship

When my heart feels cold as stone

Where have I lost all my feeling?

Should I be here anymore?

Am I looking for another?

A place to love reciprocally?

Why this heavy, sinking feeling

Why this burden that won’t lift?

Why these happy, empty faces

Why these eyes that never meet?

Always grasping, always running,

Will I ever cross the line?

In my search for satisfaction

Have I missed the final mile?

Take a second look around me

Faces now with fading smiles

Smiles that crack with pain and worry

Eyes with secrets

Matched to mine

Rising prayers petition blessing

Fragrance pleasing Hope divine

Spirits join in song unspoken

Resonating hearts unite

In this hour my questions answered

Here the place I’m looking for

Not a building, city, country

Not a home terrestrial mine

Made to dwell with God eternal

Spirit never settled here

Quench this aching, burning, longing

When this mortal flesh meets end

While I wait with passion brimming

Living member, Body, home

Love received and love extending 

Universal family

Vapor

“Let’s call it. 17:14”

An unrehearsed moment of silence.

“This won’t be an ME case, so you can pull everything, Clare”

I automatically start printing flat-lines from the heart monitor.

“Ok, I’ve got all I need, you can clear it out.”

And then I’m alone in the room with the body of the man I was trying to resuscitate only minutes earlier. I start pulling off his clothing, draping a sheet, and close his eyelids. I don’t like the eye part. But even then, I feel nothing. That sort of bothers me - the fact that I feel nothing.

“Clare, the wife and children are all here. You ready?”

I head back towards the family room. I think the doctor’s already been back. I don’t know, can’t find him.  Do they already know?

“His heart stopped in the ambulance. We did everything we could – but it never regained spontaneous activity. He passed at 17:14. It was just his time.”

My words are like vapor. Is that all I can say? His time? What is that even supposed to mean? That’s when I feel something. When I have literally nothing worth saying to someone who has lost a loved one.

Hours later, different room, different doctor. Eighteen year old, first pregnancy, six weeks and bleeding.

“Clare, can you set her up for a pelvic?”

I get my patient ready. She wasn’t bleeding heavily. Routine, I assumed.

“Have you passed any tissue, ma’am?” The doctor turns to me for forceps. “Because what I’m seeing here, I believe is the product of conception.”

Clump. Into the trashcan. More clump.

“Yes … I mean, I can’t be sure – I have to review that ultrasound report, but it’s looking as though we’re getting some tissue, products of conception being passed. You can get dressed ma’am. I’ll come back once I read that report.”

“Did you understand what he was saying?” My patient hasn’t said a word.

“I … I don’t think so. I don’t know”

What do you say? You had a miscarriage? That’s about as comforting as ‘what’s in the trashcan, is basically your dead baby.’

And why me? Why am I, the new nurse, left in the room with this girl, her douche bag boyfriend, and this awkward silence. Thanks, doc. Way to step up to the plate. Go check your little report. Your important stuff. I’ll do my nursing thing, and make up something, something Kubler-Ross-ish, that sounds all therapeutic, but means nothing.

Pull everything. Clear it out. Product of conception?

Is that all we are? A product of conception, easily wiped away, erased from memory, tucked into a vault. Vapor.

Is that why I feel nothing? Or is that why I can’t fall asleep later?

“For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb. Your eyes saw my unformed body; all the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be.” (Psalm 139:13, 16)

If this isn’t true, what’s the point? We run so far from God during life, trying to control it. But the joy of its beginning and pain at its end speak of our created existence.

“A time to be born and a time to die … a time to mourn and a time to dance. He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the human heart” (Ecclesiastes 3:2, 4, 11).

Maybe I do have something to say…

Driven

Know thyself.

                First expressed by the Greek masters, but millennia later, the idea continues to beg a satisfying psychological model. From Descartes and Locke to Freud and Maslow, Gautama and Patanjali to Rhazes and Ghandi, philosophers through the ages have stressed the significance of self-knowledge as a fundamental building block in understanding life. Even Oprah and Dr. Phil host show after show to help people resolve personal and relational conflict, with the intention of improving self-esteem.

                But what is left when the applause fades and gratification evaporates? Personal guilt and fear, perhaps transiently masked, attest to my failure of an unattainable perfection. Desire for approval and acceptance is a self-generating monster. I cannot shake the uncanny awareness of an external standard.

                Maybe that’s why I need to know myself; determine my own truth. What is my conscience, but an evolving conglomeration of intangible social mores, parental values, and individual principles? In search of inner peace, I set my own standard, but continue being driven towards a now self-imposed goal.  And somehow the internal rules prove more enslaving. The self-created ethical system and personal ideal of achievement command a greater attempt towards imagined accomplishment. Shortcomings cause despair, success only temporary satisfaction. Once reached, a goal must be superseded. Instead of finding, I am losing myself in a destructive whirlpool of introspection.

What if I am known, more fully than I could fathom or bear to discover? What if truth is external, objective, and unchanging? What if the standard has been established and attained for me?

For God made Christ, who never sinned, to be the offering for our sin, so that we could be made right with God through Christ. (II Cor 5:21)

You see, at just the right time, when we were still powerless, Christ died for the ungodly.  Very rarely will anyone die for a righteous man, though for a good man someone might possibly dare to die.  But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.

Since we have now been justified by his blood, how much more shall we be saved from God’s wrath through him!  For if, when we were God’s enemies, we were reconciled to him through the death of his Son, how much more, having been reconciled, shall we be saved through his life! (Romans 5:6-9)

What if everything demanded of me is given to me in Jesus Christ?

I can accept that my reaction to the ugliness I find within and around me is futile. Peace comes in finding the love and acceptance I once desperately craved. Confidence grows from the source of that love – the Standard, the Judge, the Perfector.

I am more sinful and flawed than I ever dared believe, yet more accepted and loved than I ever dared hope. -Tim Keller)

I can lose myself in the perfect life of another. I don’t have to try to be perfect. I am known and accepted and loved. And in being loved, I have the power to love. Love without condition and criticism, without judgment and trepidation. I can love people without fear of rejection; without selfish intent; without restrictive appraisal.

 We know love by this, that He laid down His life for us. We have come to know and have believed the love which God has for us. God is love, and the one who abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him. By this, love is perfected with us, so that we may have confidence in the day of judgment … There is no fear in love; but perfect love casts out fear… We love, because He first loved us. (from I John 3-4)

Know thyself? Yes. Possible only by knowing God. Destructive without knowing God.

Once driven, now drawn.

Be still and know.

Know God. 

This is my life

Part of me is still a little skeptical about this whole blog thing. Blogs are for people who have something to share. People who have been places and done things. People who know things. Definitely not me.
Maybe in ten years I'll have the life worth describing, the life I grew up imagining. Or maybe I'll still be right here. Right here where I take a moment every single day to mentally pinch myself into fully believing that this is the reality I live in. Everything I see, hear, and smell - this is my life. Today.
Today is not anything I ever imagined my life would be. Today is not anything I ever wanted. But today is one day of my temporary life. My vapor.
Is one day essentially any different from the next? One life from another's? What circumstances do we believe would shield us from pain, frustration, loneliness, or fear?
The person whose location, relationships, financial status, or physical appearance you may covet feels everything you feel. Sure, precipitated by a different event or following an alternate loss, but ultimately, emotions are universal.
So while I don't have the experience or knowledge people would pay for, I do believe in the power of empathy.
"You are tempted in the same way that everyone else is tempted. But God can be trusted not to let you be tempted too much, and he will show you how to escape from your temptations." (I Cor. 10:13)
Let's get beyond the facade and pressure of painting an empty reputation. Accept and embrace your temporary life.
"Dear friends, don't be surprised or shocked that you are going through testing that is like walking through fire. Be glad for the chance to suffer as Christ suffered. It will prepare you for even greater happiness when he makes his glorious return." (I Pet. 4:12-13)
We're all in it together. The same hard stuff, the same bad feelings. For now.
"I am sure that what we are suffering now cannot compare with the glory that will be shown to us. However, we hope for something we have not yet seen, and we patiently wait for it. We know that God is always at work for the good of everyone who loves him." (Rom. 8:18, 28)