It has been a particularly
unusual week. I have sat in the waiting room of two hospitals in two different
states for personal rather than professional reasons. My wife had a small
outpatient procedure in Tulsa, and our daughter had a one-month check-up in
Dallas after doctors repaired a small hole in her heart. It was a different
perspective for me to be in a hospital wearing my collar and not working … just
waiting … just like everybody else.
My wife’s procedure was early in
the morning. What I wanted to do at that hour was chill with my
eyes closed and my headphones on. But my wife and I decided that there was
no escaping my looking like I was “on duty,” and so if I did what I wanted to, I would inevitably look like
an asshole. So, instead, I chose to sit quietly in a chair and journal, all the
while trying to tune out the television. (A news story came on grading our
city’s healthcare and hospitals a D-, heightening the anxiety of everyone in
the room.) I know I looked like a hospital employee or volunteer, someone
with authority. So I wasn’t surprised when the other families would look at me
when the waiting room phone rang. I would dutifully leave my chair and
answer it, “Surgery Waiting,” as though I had been doing this my whole career.
When I had been in the same waiting room months before and not wearing a
collar though, no one had looked at me when the phone rang. But no one moved to
answer it themselves either. I, on the other hand, had answered the phone
then as well, and in exactly the same way.
In the hospital waiting room
there seems to be a leveling of the playing field. Brought together and faced with
the commonality of the mortality of someone we love and, thus, our own, those
in the waiting room are gentler with one another than they might otherwise be
in the real world. Love and fear seem to make way for a compassion that extends
beyond our immediate family – to the human family. People offer each
other newspapers and food, they hold the door for one another. Being
dragged head-first into powerlessness cuts across race and class. In the
waiting room, fear meets fear soul to soul.
In a collar, I am not afforded
even-playing-field status. My attire represents something for everyone, if
not necessarily always for myself. When I am in my collar, people think I
am supposed to be caring for others, not anxious, not distracting myself, not
cursing (see above). At my daughter's check-up, her presence made me a
mother as well as a minister. She made room for another identity. But
regardless of whether she is there or not, I have a family, ministers have
families. Ministers are people, ministers are mortal. And ministers need to
chill and close our eyes, to rest. (Even God rested, for God's sake.)
The waiting room reminds me to
care for the caregiver. While we are waiting, maybe we could be kinder
to one another – and ourselves. While we are waiting, maybe we could
stretch to see the humanity behind everyone’s role – even our own.
read and appreciated.
ReplyDeleteMary, thank you.
ReplyDelete