Four Hospital Years And Still Kind

Four years, and she still learns their names.

That is what the ward sister noticed and said out loud in the corridor last month, in front of two other people, in the way people say things they have been meaning to say for a while. Four years we have had you in and out of here, and you have never once been sharp with anybody. Not one time. And you know all our names.

She said something about it being the least she could do and went to get water.

Four years is: two hundred and something appointments, three surgeries, a night in a corridor on a chair because there was no bed, a registrar who was wrong and told them so in a way neither of them will ever forget, an insurance letter that came the day after Christmas, and a hundred small indignities that nobody records anywhere.

And in all of that she has never taken it out on a single member of staff. Not because she is above it. She would tell you plainly that in her own house, in her own kitchen, at about eleven at night, she has said things about that hospital she would not want repeated.

So she cannot explain the corridor. Where does gentleness come from at eleven in the morning in a woman who has none left at eleven at night.

You know this shape. Some long stretch where the version of you the world got was not the version you had in stock, and no way at all to account for the difference.

Say what four years cost

The corridor did not count it, so we will.

It cost her a career, which she stopped mentioning about two years in because saying it out loud in front of him felt like an accusation. It cost their savings, which is a fact rather than a complaint. It cost her the ability to hear a phone ring in the evening without something happening in her stomach.

And it cost her a hundred small indignities that have no name and no procedure: the gowns, the corridors, the being talked past, the being asked the same question by four people because nobody reads.

You have been spending down a life for four years, and God has never once compared what you had left with what the corridor got. Psalm 56:8 says your wanderings are told and your tears are in His bottle, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes that off a page and puts it on a chair in a corridor at two in the morning. Nothing in four years went unrecorded.

Not by might, and the not is the important word

There is one line built for a woman who cannot explain her own gentleness.

Not by might, nor by power, but by my Spirit, says the Lord of hosts.Zechariah 4:6

That is said to a man looking at a job far too big for the resources in front of him, and it is not encouragement. It is a correction of the accounting. He was totalling up might and power, which are the two categories any sensible person totals up, and he was told plainly that neither of them was the operative line.

And the alternative given is not a better quality in the man. It is a Person. By my Spirit, and His Spirit is the one who makes that a live explanation for a corridor rather than a famous line about rebuilding a temple.

You have been running on a supply that is not your temperament, and that is the whole explanation for four years of learning names. That is not a compliment dressed as theology. The written word rules out might and power by name and puts the Spirit in their place, and He is the one who has been gentle through a woman at eleven in the morning who had nothing by eleven at night.

And this has to be said plainly. Your husband's illness is not a display. It was not arranged so a ward could learn something about patience by watching a wife hold up. God did not make him sick to make a point in a corridor. Neither of you is an exhibit and neither of you ever was.

Two things a woman who has none left has to hear

The first is that God still supplies people. Not supplied, poetically, in an older world. Supplies, present tense, at eleven in the morning, at a nurses station.

The second is that the supply does not run on how she is doing privately. What she says in her own kitchen at night has never once interrupted it, which is the only reason four years was possible.

You were carried through four years, and the carrying never once checked what you had in stock first. Isaiah 40:29 says He gives power to the faint, and the same Spirit is the one who makes to the faint into a category a specific tired woman belongs to.

One plain sentence before we go on. If the eleven at night has gone somewhere heavier, if there are hours where carrying on is genuinely a question, please tell one real human being today, and if it is urgent, call your doctor or a crisis line before you tell anybody on the ward. That is not the supply failing. That is the supply arriving with a face and a phone number, and reaching for it is obedience rather than collapse.