What an Afternoon We Had

It was as I was hustling through the hospital, having parked on the wrong side, and having had to drive round and round finding a parking space, and having already dropped everything and sped down the parkway, leaving Matt quietly sermonizing at Barnes and Noble, beat my way past the garage full of garbage to gather up a blood encrusted Baby Elspeth, plugged her into the car and was then lugging her, as a mentioned above, all the way through the hospital trying to look for urgent care or the ER or whatever it’s called, I make point never to go there ever under any circumstances, it was then that some whisper mentioned itself to me,

The Lord orders all your steps.

Boy I sure am having a lot of them, I whispered back, to myself, or to whoever it was that was talking to me. We sat in the waiting room for two hours. Two women shuddering and moaning. Two people wheeled in on beds and transferred to chairs and left to wait. One child with a big cut right between his eyes who sat down for a moment and then stood up and vomitter gloriously and dramatically all over the rug part of the floor, not the tile (just like he was at home, I thought). One drunkish looking man who just seemed to happily be enjoying himself. Several police coming in and out. One shaky red sequined lipsticked registrar. One angry triage nurse. I watched the episode of the Duggars winding its way along on the ubiquitous tv and read the captions, surprised that it was still on. When Honey Boo Boo followed on its heals I read a chapter of Sherlock Holmes and three from Something Fresh. Baby Elspeth fell asleep and sprawled herself out in my arms, making it so that I was always about to drop my reading.

Finally we were brought back into a sort of bay and sat down on a dismal stretcher bed and Baby Elspeth drank from an extremely expensive bottle of water. Her lip didn’t look so bad any more, having had all afternoon to essentially heal itself. “You should just walk out” Matt texted, when I’d moaned about the wait and how on earth to get him home from B&N. “Well, it still does look like a chunk of her lip is missing” I shot back. Still, I thought, what am I doing here?

But then I settled in and listened to the voices in the bay next to me. I listened and listened. I know that voice, I thought. I know that voice so well. I hear that voice twice a week, every week. Once always at Shepehrd’s Bowl and once at church. It can’t be the same voice. I argued with myself for twenty minutes. A doctor came in, passed me by and went to the bay. It absolutely has to be that voice, I thought. But what on earth do I do? I can’t just go over there. That’s probably against the law. I am a law follower. I never purposefully do something the law says not to do EVER. The doctor left. I kept arguing with myself. But suddenly, the hallway cleared and everything was quiet and so I took up my courage in both clamy, and by that time, gross hands, and peaked around the corner.

It was!!! It was my Shepherd’s Bowl Friend who recently started coming to church. She’s actually officially joined the church but not very many people know her yet. She was lying there hooked up to everything in the world. We exclaimed in surprise to each other and I prayed for her and she relaxed AND now I know that she’s there. “You wouldn’t have had anyone call us, would you? Once you were admitted?”

“You’re right,” she said, “I would have forgotten.”

“This is Jesus” I looked her grand daughter in the eye who sort of reeled back.

“Yes,” said my friend, “that is definitly Jesus.”

I crept back to my own bay in time for the very nice doctor to look long and hard at Baby Elspeth and give me a choice between tying her up in a sheet or sedating her for three tiny stiches that wouldn’t make that much difference, being that the cut was almost all on her wide wide lips except for one tiny tiny cut up past the lip, and consigning her to a tiny tiny scar that could be coped with later if she ever gets self conscious about it. “I only have boys” the doctor said, “I don’t know what to do about girls. Boys like scars.”

“This girl will certainly like hers” I said. The idea of tying her up in a sheet for vanity’s sake did not appeal to me at all.

“I wanna go home” she bellowed lustily which seeled the deal.

“Good choice,” said the doctor and wrote up some stuff to let us go.

Plus side, now I can find out how much just waking into the ER is without any treatment. This is information I have always been curious to posses. Other plus, The Lord orders all our steps.

Matt spent his steps stubbornly walking home from B&N even knowing there were people on the parkway right then who could have given him a lift. “I needed a walk” he puffed when I finally scooped him up, near our old house. “God knew I needed a walk and he knew we needed to know about your friend and so he struck down poor Elinor.”

“Well, that’s not exactly how I would have put it,” I said. “I think he’s just working all our circumstances together for good. Elinor doesn’t need God’s help to put a hole in her mouth. She’s really good at doing that on her own. He probably just delayed her doing it until he could get a whole bunch of stuff done at one time.”

“I wanna go home” the baby shouted from the back seat.

“I don’t wanna cook” I said.

“Ok” said Matt, “let’s channel Taladaga Nights and go to Applebee’s.”

So we did. And later today, I’m going to pop back over to the hospital, thanking Jesus for all the gifts and knowledge that he gives.