The calm before the storm

It looks like they weren't kidding about some snow....

Feeling warm and cozy inside,
starting to snow outside.

Always plenty of books to read.

And candles for atmosphere.

Ready for anything....

Or so we think.....

My plans were to stay in, write, read, enjoy the fireplace all day long-

Instead, I wrote this....

I’m sitting in another hospital room. My brother is wired to machines and nurses search for veins in his strong arms. He sucks oxygen to counteract the carbon monoxide he inhaled when he sat for two hours in his road grader, waiting for the weird pain in his arms to pass. He was having a heart attack.

Twenty five years ago, our father was hiking in New Zealand and had "indigestion" for three days. After he and our mother returned home, she insisted on a doctor’s visit and he had had a significant heart attack.

I was surprised when I walked down the hospital hall to my brother's room. It was a bittersweet sadness that crept over me. For months a hospital, not this hospital but another, had been my familiar place, the place of fear and comfort for my husband and me.  And all hospitals feel the same. 

Do doctors and nurses feel at home at any hospital? Ho do they respond to the smells, the squeak of shoes on tile floors, the underlying burble of voices and pages?  Do they feel the fear, the hope, the weight of emotions as our babies are born, our elders die and the rest of us fight for the life that is left to us?

So today, my plans have changed, the weather continues to storm outside and once again, I am in a hospital.  But this time a life has been saved- perhaps changed forever but saved. My brother's heart had minimal damage, he is lucid and harassing his nurses, and should go home this week.   Connie, his wife, is shook but calm now that she is with him.  We are in the calm, literally in the midst of a storm.  God is good. 

And we never know when our days are not what we expect. 

We have hope because of a baby that came-
without the benefit of a hospital.


His grace needs only a needdy heart.