188 - Crisis

A curious thing happened to me as we were preparing to come home from our two-week vacation on Sanibel Island in Florida at the beginning of the year: I was too ill to travel. Arriving at the airport for a noon flight to Chicago, Reid took yet another look at me, had the airline retrieve our suitcase, and called an ambulance.

So I landed in a little community hospital in Ft. Myers for a week, while the doctor there diagnosed and treated a sodium imbalance. After a week of progressively less foggy days, still not well enough to travel by commercial airliner, we took a ride in an air ambulance back home to my own hospital and doctors.

As always, we were treated with great kindness. The nurses and respiratory therapists who were in charge of my every moment at Gulf Coast Hospital were professional and empathic. And my dear in-laws, who have a winter home on the other side of the state, drove across and stayed, Reid’s “support staff” and my welcome visitors.

Where is God in all this? Reid kept offering me my siddur; it is my custom to pray the morning service. I found myself unable to say the words. I am still struggling to begin to pray again. I know God is there. We just don’t seem to have so much to say to one another these days. Maybe I need time and space to recover not only physically but spiritually. This was a crisis on many levels. I am grateful to have been sustained through it. I will be grateful to return.

One Hundred Eighty-Eight

Crisis

Ancient words elude me,
And gasping, I turn away;
I cannot praise You now or here,
I cannot sing.

Nor have the terror and the pain;
I sink to grateful unconsciousness,
Sustained by dreamless sleep.

I balance on recovery’s edge,
Waiting for returning strength,
Waiting for Your words of hope
To fill me once again.