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Saturday, November 06, 2010

Crisis and Grace
By webmaster @ 12:01 PM :: 804 Views :: 0 Comments :: Nina Frost

This is a post from a new land. I have not written in a while because since October 2, I have spent most of my time with my mother in Connecticut, where my father fell, hit his head badly and had bleeding on the brain. The first two weeks were spent at the hospital's ICU; now he in an acute care rehab, and I am continuing to help my mom visit him from their home.

All of you have your own versions of these moments: the times, sudden or inexorable, when everything shifts, priorities are realigned, and you run the gamut of emotions: shock, fear, adrenaline, grief, and the immediate need to step into crisis management, for however long that takes.

Just as autumnal light can throw objects into sudden and sharp relief, amidst all the logistics of this past month, I have been made acutely aware of some basic, underlying themes, themes that have surprised me with their potency and persistence.

The first is focus. As a friend familiar with intense hospital time wrote, it’s amazing how focusing these experiences are, in that your world gets very precise and laser-sharp: this ICU development, that doctor’s report, this breathing tube—the setbacks and hopes of each particular day, each hour.

Medical attunement is not the only type of focus being born. As the aperture widens a bit, and as my father begins to emerge, I find that I am focusing in ways that seem both new and welcome to my formerly much more diffuse self. Jesus’ urging to “let your eye be single” is presented to me anew.

One frequent way the focus question is coming up for me—daily, even hourly—is best summarized in the classic question from the one-on-one counseling known as coaching: “What are you tolerating?” That is a question that cuts to the quick. I hear it not about the things we cannot necessarily change, but about the things we can—and shrink from, or pretend really aren’t so bad, or just stuff somewhere.

Sometimes the best clichés come home to roost with their essential truth: Yes, life can change in an instant, and no one knows when or how that will happen. I know that in a visceral way I did not before. And with that knowing comes a take-no-prisoners, tensile questioning: What needs to change? What, in the light of both autumn and this turn of events, has been shown to be less than life-giving? I suspect these questions apply to us all. And amidst a forced looking at what drains life, my family has been showered with the most life-giving support, love and prayers from a larger community than we ever knew we had.

I have written often in these blogs about one of my favorite lines of Scripture from Isaiah 43:19: “Behold, I am doing a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it? I will make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert.”

As we head towards the mysterious season of Advent, I am looking at this verse anew. In October, these words made me cringe, when I had time to think about them at all. Now, they feel like a doorway into wonder.

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