Body Language

I would love to tell you that I always love my body.

That I appreciate my scars for the story they tell.
That I value the oddly shaped contours of my poor long bones.

That I love the strange angles that my contracted ankles and elbows grace me with.

But I would be lying.

But then again I have been lying a lot today.

All three of my best friends are getting married in the next 18 months.  Today I went to get fitted for my first of several bridesmaid dresses at the infamous David’s Bridal which has never been my favorite.  The dress is sleek, asymmetrical, one shoulder empire waist canary colored gown.  My shoulders have some impressive scars. My elbows are awkwardly angled. All around me are girls with shoulders with no scars, with normal contours.  And for a moment I feel naked, exposed and ancient.

I rip the dress off, buy it (ugh!) and run home. My best friend who knew I was going dress shopping calls me all excited. I try so hard to keep up the level of excitement because its her wedding.  And I want her to be happy.   She nearly drags it out of me, I dance around the issue a bit, mumbilng a bit.  She tells me I can return the dress, I can wear a shawl.  She is upset.  I tell her its fine.  SO FINE.  DOn’t worry about it, its not her, its not the dress its just me.

My disability mentor Bliss tells me  that I should embrace my body and I wholeheartedly agree.

Its the practice that sometimes hard, especially when you are in your 20s and have to wear frequent formal wear not designed for anyone but especially not for bodies that are different than average.

One of my friends here who has Marfan’s and some other skeletal issues has had some “work” done on several scars.  I wish I had her courage, however, the whole starving children in Africa and my intense PTSD/extreme dislike for being a surgical patient rule this out. She tells me either way that my feelings are normal.  I want them to be normal but I also dislike the idea of hating the body I have.

Because in my head I agree with Bliss, bodies are beautiful in all shapes, sizes and with many marks and contours that tell our stories. So I pray God gives me grace to love my body and help others love theirs.

i’m getting married in chacos and capri pants.

OK so maybe not capri pants but chacos and a dress that drapes my shoulders a bit and doesn’t make me feel like a member of an alien race.

Evangelical FAIL

The other day we were doing what residents do best. Fantasize about having a better schedule.  Our colleague BOB seemed to have won the jackpot, he had the last two weeks of Dec off and then an extra five days including News Years for a family wedding.

JANE, another colleague says, “I think BOB got that schedule because he had JESUS on his side.”

I laugh and said, well I go to the same church and it didn’t work for me.

JANE and JOAN stare for a moment.

JANE says, “I didn’t know you were an evangelical”  But she said it in such a way that it was like I didn’t know you smoked or I didn’t know you throw rocks at puppies on the weekends…..

“UM, well yeah….maybe a bit more laid back.” I flounder wanting desperately to explain I didn’t love BUSH, Im a pacifist, I haven’t bombed any abortion clinics, I watch trashy TV sometimes, I read Harry Potter and yes in my less thoughtful moments I use off color words I learned from my naval heritage.

JANE smiles, “Yeah, well I love Bob, I was just joking around.”

Then one of us got paged.

….two weeks latter….

Two weeks later I am out with GABI who I have been friends with for a while but whom I find myself having a series of deep and more personal conversations with.  GABI tells me she is something akin to gnostic. She impressed I know what that means and we start talking world religions. I am holding my own.  Then she comes right out and says it:

“So you love Jesus? You’re a Christian?”

I explain that in all my studies what impressed me the most was the incarnation that God would come down and live as we do to provide a vehicle to get us out of a spiritual life the equivalent of a TO DO LIST which we could never complete  and that its all about the relationship with GOD that we can have through knowing and believing in Christ.

This question was easy.

It was the series of next questions that I found myself sweating a bit.

“So how do you feel about missionaries?” (which is a big question if you look at historically and currently) (or as I like to say do you mean in the JOSEPH CONRAD’s HEART OF DARKNESS sense?)

I start with HEART OF DARKNESS and colonialism and move on down to my own experiences. I end with saying what I believe in the context of a relationship is quite different than the HEART OF DARKNESS sense.  She nods and talks about how Church NGOs do a lot of good.

“So do you think, Christianity is the only path to heaven? DO you believe in a literal hell?”

(these are loaded questions: If the answer is YES and YES you are condemning 5 billion humans on earth today to hell).

I believe in Christ (note that I separate Christ and the gospel from Christianity which is a human construct) is the truth and the path. However, I don’t really know how it all works out.  Only God truly knows people’s hearts and knowledge.   As for Hell, Milton and Dante seem to know a lot more about it than I do because other than a parable or two in the Gospels and some heavily loaded metaphor in Revelation, Hell is not described in detail in scripture.  I know it will be separate from GOD which sounds terrible but in the spiritual sense not so much the physical sense.

At this point, GABI who is also a physician interrupts me and says “When I think of Hell, I think of homeless schizophrenics at war with their selves and living cast off from any sense of human contact.”

I nod, who knows, maybe HELL is like that.  I continue…

As for who goes to whatever it is, well again GOD only knows.   The party line Billy Graham crusade answer is that its a punch ticket kind of thing, you go through the right prayer, life style change or whatnot and you get the right ticket punch. Over the millennium Christians have  made up all kinds of ideas of  loopholes. Babies for example apparently are innocent so if they die, its OK they get to go without a ticket, developmentally disabled people too (a babe in Arms kind of ticket).  These babe in arms kind of tickets are made up, they are not in scripture, we don’t know what happens.  Now, do I honestly believe that God sends babies to Hell?  My understanding of God is somewhat different than that, so NO I don’t believe that. But I don’t how it works.  So do I believe that folks in some dark jungle who never heard about Dante or JESUS go to hell?  My church peers would say that’s on us to some degree for not going as missionaries.  Do I think God will send them to hell?  Again I do not know.  I don’t know what that looks like.  I also don’t know exactly what will happen to all the people pre-Jesus. I don’t know.  SO do I believe people, go to hell, YES but I don’t know who or where or what exactly it is.

As for Heaven, some believe the Kingdom of God will come to earth over time as we build it, some believe we will go to it.  I think the former is ambitious and maybe a bit impossible but I think the Gospels are pretty clear about trying anyway. While I am interested in hell, I am far more interested in what we do now to mirror heaven and spread its seeds in the mud and mire of the hellish elements of now.

I explain as well that while I believe in things absolutely, I live with mystery in my faith, of unanswered questions and gratitude to a GOD who is big enough to be mysterious to my human mind. I live with unanswered questions, with faith and I am OK with that.

My friend seems impressed.   We drank our tea and then we go home.  I think she expected me to start reading Romans out loud and pray the sinner’s prayer and give her a tract.  Because I am evangelical, right?

As I go home that night, I think what would my friends from church say if they listened to this conversation? What would BOB say? What would they say if they heard me admit that I don’t have all the answers?  Would they have done the same?  Some would have, but I think most would have stayed within safety of the party line where we have the answers.  I think they would think that I lost my religion.

Am I failed evangelical?  Have  I gone native in all my intellectual quests of reading the Koran, the Mormons, the Buddhists, the Baptists, the Skeptics and the Gnostics, dissecting the layers of culture, history, human creativity from the raw text, from what we call religion?  Do I believe in nothing because I “tolerate” and analyze everything?

NO.

I do believe in something, actually its quite akin to what I believed when I told my parents I wanted to be baptized when I was five before I knew about all of the other stuff we tacked on to the truth.  I believe in the love of a GOD who would love me even though I hit my sisters Emily and Tori every day and some times wish I could go back to being three when I was an only child.  A GOD who created the trees, the deer behind our house that left footprints in the snow, my cat, the moon, the stars Daddy taught me the names of, a GOD who created an elaborate plan to love me  me despite the my wrongs. The plan included sending someone he loved like I loved my parents and my paternal grandparents (and mostly Emily and Tori), a piece of himself who suffered through annoying little siblings and stuff and in the end died pretty awfully  and somehow in something that seemed at the time a lot like magic came back alive to get the rest of us before he went ON so we could all still be friends with God.

GABI says her husband and I have little girl and boy souls, we still believe the same as we did when we were children.

I would say that’s actually quite biblical and I am OK with that.

What has changed somewhere between church camp and now  is that the religious brainwashing has melted gradually over the Serengeti grasses, my ferocious appetite for books and reading, the wails of orphaned, neglected Romanian babies, long nights of organic chemistry followed by ethics and human rights essays in college and blood dripping off my gloves, sweat and tears running down my face as I beat on a child’s chest trying to save their life, I lost my religion.

And found JESUS.

Make New Friends but keep the old….

The sermon on Sunday was on good friends.

The kind of friends who you can show up dripping wet on their door step after the worst day and they will let you in, let you cry a bit, tell you to clear off the laundry from the sofa and rest or hand you a crying baby and to get busy (which ever seems the right reaction).  The kind who tell you the truth both good and bad. And the kind of friends that point you to Christ and speak wisdom into your life.

I am blessed young woman. Because at quick count I can count about 10 friends like that in my life.

Then the sermon went on to making your life where you are, finding those friends where you are and locally because thats how the local church was. The elder argued that we cant live elsewhere. We have to live here and now.

I shifted uncomfortably. I have tried very, very hard to build roots like that here. But frankly they just have not dug deep.  I go to things post-call, I go to things when I am so sleepy I can’t stay awake, I am in a small group, I go to social events, I go to church and I have done these things for a year an half but the people who are the friends that keep me sane are not here.

One out the 10 are local and they followed me here from NC.  You may ask how I make this work. How I deal with my best friends being far way? How I keep myself accountable? How I keep myself sane?  Well when you grew up all over the US and plan on living all over the world…you learn fast.

I felt guilty about this and then I just realized you know this is  a season of my life.  God knows I have tried and he seems to have brought people into my life for the right seasons. I have faith he has done the same here.

Maybe its not the 15 people in my small group, maybe its the 6 amazing young women in my residency program who I spend consistent time with. Maybe its the children who steal my heart, maybe its the preparation for having my friends a continent a way.

Here’s the truth. I am a little bit more of a Paul/Priscilla kind of figure than a Lydia or Mary/Martha. Jesus have multiple friends in different cities.  I am a nomad by birth and by calling.

So make new friends, invest in where you are, yes.  But keep the old.

Gratitude

One of the things about growing up with a progressive although manageable illness is it teaches you gratitude for the little things that make life truly beautiful.

Baking something yummy.

North Carolina Wine

Old Friends.

New Friends.

Summer Nights.

Clean clothes.

Good Books

Clean hair.

Pedicures

Grace

Children and their wisdom.

A Good Night’s Sleep

Where is my compassion?

Its 4 AM.

I am so tired I can hardly move much less make a life altering decision for someone else’s baby.   I am so tired that despite my fleece, knee high socks and scrubs I am shivering. My body aches, my right hip feels like its going to burst and the muscles around the shiny hip are stained.  I am tired to the point that I am short tempered, angry and I can’t remember why I am doing this no matter how hard I try all I can feel is anger. Anger at the child. At the parent. At the nurse. I try so hard not but all i feel is anger. Its not the baby’s fault. Its not the baby’s fault I say to myself.  As I drag myself to the room of another sick child, I can’t remember the child’s name and awkwardly refer to them as “the sweet baby” or “pretty little girl” or “buddy”.  I am covering 60 kids and I am on hour 23 of call and I just can’t bring myself to care beyond just making it another two hours to sign out when my comrades will get there…..and beyond to 7 hours from now when I can go home and sleep in my warm bed….

I look down at the baby, someone’s child and all I can think is how did I get here and why am I going through this torture.  Where is the compassion I had in medical school? Where is the excitement I had in college? Where is the dream?

I am making preparations for Kenya. I am counting down the hours till I can pack up my little CRV and drive across the mountains home for a night, north for a precious and much needed steroid shot and then boarding a plane to take me EAST…..

and then SOUTH. to warmth.

escape.

to more sick children….but somehow in Kenya its different.  Maybe it waking up to the Great Rift Valley with the mist burning off the smoldering African plains, maybe its the craziness, the chaos that is a hospital in rural East Africa, maybe its the grateful smiles of every parent, maybe its quiet morning prayers. Maybe its that life exists on Africa time.  Maybe its that I can’t call for 20 consults.  Maybe its that the internet works ON A GOOD DAY only. Maybe its because for a little while I can be Amy again not Amy the super intern at a top program or Amy who wants a competitive fellowship or chief spot.  I can just be Amy who knows some medicine, who knows what its like to suffer and who works to find some way to bring those things together in a productive way that brings healing. Maybe I can just be.

Its the 4 AM of my 12 month internship and I am tired, cold, sore and angry.

so I do the only thing I know how to do….fly, fly, fly away to somewhere life is harsher yet simpler.   Somewhere that i knew and learned compassion and that I pray will be gracious enough to teach and humble me again.