Standing Propped Up In The Need of Prayer

The call came at ten fifteen as I was walking down the hall headed towards the bedroom. It had been a busy day filled with a board retreat in our home, a run to Smiley Parker’s Feed and Seed to pick up fertilizer for the hay fields and feed for the horses and cows, and all the usual farm chores. I was tired from getting the house and yard ready for the retreat and a night of sleep, sweet sleep, beckoned me. It was not to be.
Tina’s voice was weak and frail sounding. She is in the hospital for complications from dialysis and is struggling. Yesterday she endured a heart catheterization, a needle in her chest to draw off fluid around her heart and dialysis. Vince, her husband, is having recurring pain in his leg from non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. He needed to go home to his bed, take his medicine and sleep.
As I drove through the quiet dark night, I marveled at our friendship with Vince and Tina. Vince was one of our main carpenters for the house we built here on the farm. He took great delight in fashioning wooden shiplap board walls and creating the cutout slat pattern for the front porch rails. Tina, raised hard and turned out cranky, is dear and tender underneath. She makes the best buttermilk cornbread I have ever eaten. Last night she needed a skin face for God and I was tagged It.
Hurting and afraid, she began talking as soon as I entered the room. “Tell me about our grandbabies”,she said. So I did. I told every story from this past week as she sat on the side of the bed resting her back. Aidan’s new girl friend Rory, Mason’s learning his letters and numbers, Mead sitting on the potty, Matthew going to his first lock in at church...As a final flourish I added the story of Jacob, a once upon a time grandchild of mine, peeing on his head at school... accidentally, of course. All though, knowing Jacob, it could have been accidentally on purpose. Then she began to talk and talk she did until two in the morning. We talked about spring, good weather coming, gardens to plant, fishing with the grandbabies, moving up the hill away from all the construction confusion and dust at the bridges, good friends, and life in the hard places. The pain pill came at two and by two thirty she was asleep so I slipped out and drove home to my bed.
Courage and grace come in the strangest packages sometimes. There she lay, tired and hurting and afraid of “passing out”, a salty dog of a woman, in her suffering transformed into creature of gratitude and grace. She thanked me for coming. No thanks were needed but I did tell her I would take a pan of cornbread when she got home.
All of us live on the edge. We live with the illusion of having our lives under control and that is what it is, an illusion. Our need for one another, our inability to manage alone in time of great sorrow or illness, mirrors our need for God. None of us stands on our own two feet. We are always propped up by others and ultimately, held up by God’s presence. It is easier to know our frailty and utter dependence when we are laid up or knocked down. Whether we choose to name it or not, to claim it or not, all of us will be laid low at some point(s) in our lives. That time of suffering, of absolute inability to manage, can be a holy time, a time to choose to let others care for us. The spiritual got it right... we all are standing in the need of prayer.
Tina kept saying, “You don’t know how bad it feels not to be able to do for yourself, Peggy.” The truth of the matter is I do know. I haven’t been laid low by physical suffering, yet, but I have stood in need, propped up by friends and family during dark hours of sorrow and depression. It is hard not to be able to do for yourself but it is also a great gift. In the dark quiet echoing silence of the soul when the body plumb gives out, you can hear the footsteps of God coming to you. Skin faces of God in the faces of friends and family surrounding you, propping you up, holding you in the Arms of Love until you are able to stand once again, infinitely grateful for the Love the will not let you go. When my time comes to face physical limitations, I hope I will be clarified and cleansed, transformed into a creature of graceful acceptance, my hard crunchy heart softened by need, keeping my face turned towards God and my soul rising up towards home. May it be so, Lord, please, for Tina and for me?