The sorrow may last for the night….but J O Y comes in the morning

Child birth.

Let me tell you its messy for the mom, for the family, for the baby, for the doctor, etc. And not just physically messy. I delivered four babies and received about 40-60ish now (the pediatrician who resuscitates the baby in the delivery room or just dries them off depending how messy it all is).

Its painful and sometimes the sorrow in that room from things not going the way we all hoped is bottomless.

Pregnancy is painful.  Parenting is painful.

Believe while I don’t know personally, I live so close to it on a daily basis ,I know.

Last night I went to the woman’s bible study.  Because it was Monday and my Roommate is interviewing and eating grits (for the first time)  in Charleston, SC. She called me and said Amy, how did you ever leave the 60 degrees in Feb, the friendliness and the laid back, sit on your porch and watch the world go by kind of place.?  I told her I have no idea what came over me.  Basically I was homesick and lonely so I went to bible study even after telling myself that a bible study that looked at biblical womanhood in a church that currently loves Mark Driscoll a wee bit too much was a BAD BAD idea for me.

The passage we looked at was 1 Timothy 2, the part where we talk about not braiding our hair, not wearing gold or pearls and that we will be saved through childbearing.  We spent 45 minutes talking about the pain of womanhood from menstruation to labor to motherhood.  Don’t get me wrong, there are times where being a girl is not awesome but there was this sense of shame in the room. Shame about not controlling our emotions, shame about how painful pregnancy, childbirth, etc is.   I finally just came out and said what was flashing in my brain not out of anger but because I just couldn’t bear to watch the other ladies sit there squirming. And because I have worked 95+ hours in the last week and there is no filter anymore, there is just words.

There is no mold of a perfect woman in Christ, its not the secular mold, its not the evangelical mold (gasp).  This should be  liberating not condemning.  My comment actually was not poorly received, the word liberating caused some general discomfort (tragic…read Galatians…please).   Now I will give this church credit while I have never been to the men’s bible study naturally I have heard the sermon excerpts geared toward guys and they are equally hard on men which is a refreshing change in some ways from the norm.  So I don’t think this is one of those “Its all Eve’s fault” kind of things.  Yet I still don’t think most of those ladies left convicted and liberated.  Just convicted and guilty,

The elephant in the room….is when Paul says women will be saved through childbearing, I don’t think he meant the literal practice, I think he was using it as a metaphor. This is especially important because we take the rest of the passage as metaphoric (we still braid our hair and wear jewelery) , I don’t love the lets pick the metaphors out of literal sentence game…either this is a literal passage or its not. Don’t dance around it to the parts you like.

Child bearing results in children and for someone who spends a lot of time with babies….95 hours in the last 7 days.  Babies are complicated and messy and yes they can even bring us pain.  But for the 40-60 mothers who I passed their child to them for the first time….it was pure joy.  A joy that I don’t think happens to men in the same way and I don’t think there are many better pictures of unconditional love.  Being a woman means we have a special understanding of this because we have the capacity to bear children and experience this.So yes we (men too)  are saved through childbearing…through unconditional love, the kind of love that lays down one’s life for one child or one friend.

kind of like Jesus.

Perfect love drives out all fear, drives out sin and pain and brokenness. That’s the gospel.  God has made a curse into something beautiful.

but we didn’t talk about that. and my 95+ hour work brain couldn’t articulate as well I wanted to in the moment.

A Good Death

Nights in the NICU anywhere is to stand in the strange gap between heaven and earth.  Everyone is coming and going somewhere.

In Africa, we would run our list prior to call and come across a name of a baby who was struggling or had an infection we could not beat, there were no ventilators or was just too small, too early for us to give it a fighting chance with what we had.  We would say, Baby so and so is going home tonight. It doesn’t meant we won’t try, it doesn’t mean we haven’t racked our brains of what we can do with with what we have. But we know our limitations and we also know that us beating on the chest of a premature new born who needs a ventilator we don’t have is not going to help anyone.

Home is an evangelical phrase that is a reference to a verse in Paul’s letters that talks about being citizens of heaven and not of earth.

But I like it because it implies that death is not just about leaving, its also about going.  Babies don’t have the need for our theology and politics but  they remember where they came from.

In America, when a baby is dying in the NICU, we stand around running through every physiological rotation, we throw every drug we can think of, we call in the surgeons, who join the circle around the bedside, we try experiments, we give blood, fluids like we have unlimited resources,  we switch around ventilators left and right, we talk about the baby in the circle as some academic enigma whose body is just not doing what we tell it to do. The parents hover just inside the circle. Most are stoic, looking at the baby back to our circle, trying to decipher our academic whispers.  We tell them the truth, we tell them the baby is going to die.

In Africa, the mothers visit every two hours to breast feed or pump to feed through a feeding tube. They are devoted beyond belief.  We don’t mess around when a baby is dying, Mom will sit by the bedside in vigil, holding the baby, loving the baby. Other than making the baby comfortable we don’t interfere. In some ways, its the worse feeling in the world as a physician and in other ways its liberating to be able to give the baby and their family that moment.

Last night, we had a baby that had had every thing we had to offer who was dying, this went on for about 7-8 hours.  The mother was alone, young, she didn’t seem to understand what we were saying when we told her, her daughter was dying. She went home to sleep 20 mins afterwards. Perhaps it was the crowd of onlookers, the 25 people standing around still intervening. It didn’t look like the end, it looked like the middle of the battle. I called the chaplain and we called her back.  It took no less than 45 minutes to change the tubes around enough so that Mom could hold the baby.  I am watching the monitor the whole time and watching the baby heart rate drop alarmingly fast.  By the time Mom got to hold the baby the baby was purple and no longer had detectable pulses, we were breathing for the baby.   But the baby was gone.

Why did we wait I cried out internally?  What in the name of all that is good were we doing??????  WHY is she still on the dam monitor?  If we hadn’t waited till past the 11th hour, we could have found a private room for this Mom, we could have let her hold her, sing to her, cry, call her family. She never held her child alive or if she did it was for seconds to minutes. What really mattered here? We knew 8 hours ago that we were pulling for straws.  What were the extraordinary measures here?

Instead, she held a dead baby for about 45 minutes in the middle of a NICU pod with the sickest patients so with people constantly in and out. Even with screens….it was hellish.   And the moment heaven meets earth should haven’t to be.  It doesn’t have to be like this.

I am not saying the agony of what I don’t have in Africa is better but the agony of having everything except for the one thing that really matters in America is  haunting.   Its haunting because we have lost a grip on life in our attempts to foil death.

Either way the baby dies, its about how they die.

Confessions, awkward prayers, awakened possibilities

Well I told someone exactly how I feel in terms of being a bad evangelical.

It was not my pastor. It was a kind man about my parents’ age who is also a bad evangelical who runs an intentional community.  I am not quite where he is, in that I am pretty sure he simply sees Jesus as a moral teacher. But I so greatly appreciated his story, his life and his willingness to listen to my story.

He told me that he had built his career as a missionary and now has very little to show for it because now he has evolved into a liberal that is no longer accepted in evangelical circles.  His biggest advice was to not end up that way. It will be different from me as a physician but still very good advice.

Literally 15 mins after that I sat in a strange yellow room on a sofa saying I wanted prayer for the choices I had to make.  Two things were abundantly clear to me in that moment.  This guy who is my pastor really doesn’t know me so well and well as a result its awkward. And then I also realized that while he and I on paper have similar theology, our application of that theology is completely different.  I handed them my reference form and ran to PT.

So I stand in the middle of these two extremes.  And for now that is ok.  The reality is for now I am a liberal evangelical and I am ok with that.

Confessions

I don’t like Mark Driscoll.

I like Rob Bell including his new book. (not that new any more.)

Although I don’t think either of them are heretics or the end all of preachers.

I don’t really love Campus Crusade in fact it makes me cringe.

I don’t like George Bush all that much.

Although I don’t think Obama is the end all and be all.

I think women can be ministers. In fact some of the most influential ministers of my life are women.

I dont hate gay people.

I actually have very little in common with other white middle class 20 year olds who grew up in evangelical homes. Who Knew?

Growing up looking different makes you think different. Living in the lowest caste in society for periods of time (Eastern Europe) makes you realize most of us dont get a lot of choice in the cards we get dealt socioeconomically.   Trying to pretend like this didn’t happen to me is like being in high school and trying to fit in. I just can’t do it anymore.

I am not sure what I was thinking when I moved here and joined my current church but I think I was high on the novelty of a new adventure and didn’t read the fine print.  But now 18 months in, I realize, what the heck was I was thinking?

The timing is insane….I am in the mist of applying to mission agencies.  I need references. But I can’t live the lie any more.

So Monday, I am going to try something different, something very similar to the direction the community in NC I was a part of was going.  Its just dinner.  Near my home with people who like Jesus.  People from all walks of life, I can promise you I will be the only doctor although perhaps not the only disabled person.

And I am hoping that I can be a part of a faith community and have some integrity.

As for my references….Im not sure what to do yet. I am praying about it.

Pray for me.

No really, I want to leave and by leave I mean…oh snark it

So its here the first global health application….

and I panicked.  I am also ill with some RSV like illness.

Suddenly in the last week, I have looked around realized I have it made.

I have a brilliant mentor who has actually succeeded in founding a clinic in one of the most violent neighborhoods in America that is celebrating nearly 20 years.  Not to mention his work in Africa. Not to mention, he actually seems to think I am great.  He is sending me to Malawi this July.

I work at the best childrens hospital in the world. No really….people come from EVERYWHERE to be here.  Every day we have applicants who are interviewing dying to come here. The learning here is amazing, the teaching opportunities are amazing.

Today I went to see my uber boss, to ask about writing a program director letter for me for my fellowship applications.  He hugged me and said “I brought you here….of course I will write you a letter for whatever you want.”

Yes its cold here, yes its on the wrong side of my beloved mountains, yes people here look at me funny when I say “yll” but by golly I don’t think leaving is what I want.

I want to go to Africa but I think if I could have my cake and eat it too. I want to be a fellow from here.  This is where I want to represent.

…..never mind that the fellowship only exists on paper.  And there is no actual money set aside.

I can dream, can’t I…