Quiet waiting

All is quiet in this house.  A baby is cocooned in his swing, occasional  small snorts and grunts interrupt the steady tick-tock of a wall clock.  The door is closed and the morning birds are silent. A car passes with a hum.  A young mother sleeps and heals. 


And I wait.  I wait for a baby's cry, a young mother's yawn and the two to be united again in the ageless giving of milk and life.   And I wait for news. 


As I made a cup of tea, I prayed- for peace for a family, for skill for a doctor, for the Spirit of God to invade an operating room in Chicago.  Because last week,  the young mother and her husband found out his best friend- his childhood friend, high school team mate, the best man at his wedding, a strapping young man has a brain aneurysm. 


This vigorous young man is a high school teacher and baseball coach. At batting practice, he was hit by a errant ball and developed a concussion. Not a big deal- he was in a batting cage, he's young, in great health but let's just do a CT scan anyway. Doctors and their toys.... found a large, a very large aneurysm buried deep in his brain.  What are the chances of him having it? And what are the chances of finding it before it ruptured?


An aneurysm in the human body is a time bomb in a blood vessel. Sometimes it's small and stable, sometimes large and deadly. But buried in your brain is a terrible, vulnerable place- one minute you have the worst headache of your life, the next you're are disabled, a vegetable or dead. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmedhealth/PMH0002387/


So today the doctors are operating, using their knowledge and skill to fix his brain. What an amazing world we live in that we can even attempt to thread a line through the human body's vascular system and place a coil of platinum into the imperfect artery. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=15J5s9fwSEE  


So I made my tea and thought, "Many people, family and friends, are waiting and praying for this young man but there are also many millions of people completely oblivious to those of us who wait, to our crisis."  I'm so aware of life continuing as normal for most while there is a crisis ongoing in another life- people continue to eat and sleep and work while someone's life hangs in the balance, while a new widow mourns the loss of her normal everyday life.... while we wait. 


As believers we wait for the Kingdom of God to be on earth as it is in Heaven, we wait for Jesus to return, for the fulfillment of all we now hope for.  But I  don't always live my life in restless expectancy, I don't always pray as I make tea for Thy Kindgom come, Thy will be done.  But I want to. 


I want to be aware, as I am today, that I can join in the great chorus of praise and supplication, praising God for who He is and asking Him to continue to do what only He can do.  And asking Him to show me my part here on earth. 


The baby stirs, the young mother wakes for her breakfast. Life goes on.  As we wait.