Heal, Grow, Make Him Room

Heal, Grow, Make Him Room
Another nights meandering thoughts, roughshod, unedited, so you know it’s me and not AI (but also because I am a lazy editor, and somewhere one of my MFA professors cries and shakes her head because I learned absolutely nothing or so it would seem)

I wander down the back trails, too swampy to build, perfect for me. There are all sorts of surprising botanical decisions He’s made back here, the magnificent hundreds of years old weeping willow– split open with white salicin rich bark, as if knowing a herbalist God fearing mama with a blood clotting disorder and severe and spreading lupus would live here. Along the path also, motherwort, st johns wort, more elderberry than you could gather, mulberry, stinging nettles, blue vervain, boneset, lobelia, and our favorite applemint all grow back here. All kinds of medicine for a girl that has been to the ER four times in the past week, and worsening.

Two sundays ago in Kenosha Wisconsin, I had some of the most barbaric and incompetent, flatly dangerous treatment I’ve ever received at an ER–I told my husband I felt like I was like I was some hated POW in an enemy hospital that they only technically had to keep breathing.
After having lost all my body fluids through excessive vomiting, sweating, and other means, so much so that my hands had curled into balls and my jaw wouldn’t open, I was shaking and freezing cold, with acute pancreatitis which wasn’t diagnosed, they sent me home with zofran and IV fluids, despite how many times I tried, through a clenched jaw to tell them I had lupus, it was severe, and my blood behaves badly.

The next day my routine kidney and neurological labs showed my CRP (inflammation) was a startlingly high 54, and the next day the pain in my chest was so bad it hurt to move or walk. I have to reckon which ER is better– the closest, fastest, cleanest doesn’t have any imaging– which they usually need– so I went to the local Elkhart General of which I am a frequent flyer, nice staff but the beds are terrible and the TV channels are sparse and dont like to change (if that matters to you). I was diagnosed with pericarditis, inflammation around the heart. Which worsened. Thursday night I was back in the ER– south bend’s memorial, after an abdominal scan added gallstones, liver cysts, among other things.

It is hard to be in my body sometimes.

Especially lately, the chest pain, the dizziness, I can’t complete a sentence at times, my arm turning pale and purple, my blood pressure spiking, and the cold sweats beading off my freckles, having to have my kids repeat phrases again and again I can’t completely make it out when the whole room is getting smaller and weirder and my chest feels filled with broken pottery.

ER again on sunday, I wanted to drive to the heart hospital in Indy but I was already to dizzy to really safely be driving to South Bend. Pericarditis, pericardial effusion, but these are trauma doctors, and ER docs generally do not want to have to deal with lupus– as my one ER doc said, “it’s like trying to hunt down and treat a ghost.”

I cleared my schedule, something I am hesitant to ever do, I am usually able to handle it. I am the solo-hiking girl (with a Bear-dog) who carried a sixty-five pound pack for the first week or so on the Appalachain trail, unwilling to lighten it much, I am strong, I want to be prepared and have comfort items.I only stopped the trail when I literally couldn’t put weight on my left food and took hours to return a few short miles to town.

After a car accident that left my first car totaled in high school I went to class with broken bits of windshield in my hair. Again, returning to dance after another totaled car, with a broken sternum.

I live in a way of failure isn’t an option. It isn’t, you always have to figure it out, you always have to find a way through, you can never give up. You have to be tenacious, scrappy, and down for a fight like these little weeds that spring up on a mission from God to live darn it(!)

As disturbing as it is when my hands shake when I reach for something so that I have to focus in to use my hands, God isn’t like these doctors that don’t know what else to do with me. “We literally can’t give you anything else, you’re already on too much and it all interacts.”

Here’s the thing about God, He is an incredible inventor. He made His stuff to run really well. He isn’t the guy in a sweatshop just producing roughshod disposable items that you buy cheap because you know you’re going to get a few uses out of before you have to replace– no, He makes mountains and oceans, and hippopotamuses and hummingbirds bones: when He builds He makes things glorious, intelligent, surprising, and delightful.
He is magnificent. He has created this place to run well, to thrive, and to heal. We have lost touch of His wisdom. We have lost touch of the fact that He is kind, generous, growing more than enough for the birds and the squirrels and the aunts and the farmers and the bees. He has not lost His love for us, we have lost our love for Him.

We built pyramids of science around a God that either “doesn’t exist” or one that is dispassionate, indifferent, and potentially cruel. Most doctors shift uncomfortably about the room in a way that seems to suggest that if there was a God they don’t really have time to ask Him for advice. There is so much suffering that unless you are walking out there studying what He is actually doing you are going to be lulled into the delusion that our sterile concrete, gasoline, and metal towers of babel are the epicenters of life and human thriving. They are not.

I used to be energized when I went to cities, now I feel like I have to be hypervigilant in my prayers. Surrounded by a thick haze of the demonic, the oppression of the human heart- when God is yourself you are ruled by a tyrant. I am saddened by cities, I am saddened by many of the people I meet in them.

I was tottering around the ability wheelchair expo in chicago, trying to be as thrilled and joyful as possible, through gritted teeth and a face that was bathed in a cold sweat. I’d point to something cool and my arm would shake. I was desperate to sit in one of the many wheelchairs on display but didn’t want to be disrespectful. This able-bodied-appearing girl who actually very badly needed to use one.

At one booth I was buying a special grabber tool for my son and the seller said “you look too healthy to need one of these.”
“I’m actually not.” He gave me the go-ahead eye, (I promise I wasn’t just being dramatic, although that can be fun at times):
“I am a really really sick person. I was in the ER three times last week, but you are right this is for my son he’s in a wheelchair over there.” He didn’t believe me until I pointed with a black and blue arm.

It’s hard when you want to be fun and exciting and whimsical and carefree and romp around the floor with your perfect adorable grubber children but instead you feel like a beached whale. I apologize a lot to them for how sick Mama is and I tell them all the time how much I’d rather be doing fun stuff with them. We sit and read books. Tonight I sang Great is thy faithfulness over and over as I pet Miss May’s hair and looked at the pictures in her children’s Bible. I told Bubba how proud I was of him, what a leader of a young man he is becoming, helping prevent and cleanup messes, and playing so nicely with Miss May.

Mortality is never far from any of us. You don’t have to have a ground-cover like chronic illness that fails to respond correctly to medication and spreads all tentacle-like into all your remaining organs to know that the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand, but it does certainly help.

I would be robbing you of a rightful ending if I didn’t tell you how magnificent His kingdom is though. I know Him, I know Him really well. I’ve always known Him, and He is so good. I feel uncommonly blessed that He gave me this little six acres in Bristol, (I say it continuously and defensively because people always seem to want to make us move but if someone wants me to move away they will have to drag my cold dead body off this land because I will not leave willingly)
I couldn’t love my house on its hill overlooking its swamp anymore if I possibly tried. I love how he moves the sky right into my window and how the light turns rainbow prisms across my weathered old map of town of Bristol, Trevor’s taxidermied black duck, and my sign “For indeed, a house is a little church.” It’s always rainbow prism spots right as we do milk and Bible time, right on cue.

I am deeply and abundantly grateful for how much rain He’s given us the past few weeks as I’ve been so sorely and pitifully out of commission– my trees and roses and wildflowers have never looked better. My bluebird families that stay with me year round are especially soft and plump and blue looking as they watch us come and go below them on the telephone wire right out back, and my saint bernard likes to sit on the hill and let out a few warning woofs to the coyotes and night creatures that live on the outskirts.
My kids couldn’t be more beautiful, or funny, or intelligent, or sweet. And lately I learned an interesting fact about the soil quality and how it so easily grows Hoary Alyssum, horseweed, fringed willowherb, reed canary grass– a sign of heavy metals in the soil, and God’s little weeds coming to re-balance out the land. He knows what we need, He has created a world that wants to heal and thrive, but we can only heal and thrive in His presence, that soft beautiful prism light.

So we make our lives like little churches and we constantly push ourselves and our bad ideas out of the way to make Him room.