A Prayer in the Waiting Room

I just finished with my oncologist.  While the news is still positive, the course of treatment is rough, and the atmosphere in the oncology department, well, it reeks of misery, desperation, and despair.  I wait my turn at “check out” and don’t find the irony amusing.  I look over the waiting room. 

There is an aged and limping husband who lovingly wheels his partner, gaunt, thin, and hairless into the room.  He replaces her vomit tray when it falls off her blanketed lap. He cleans her mouth. He patters with her a bit to pass the time.

There is the couple that bickers and bickers, loud and long.  Nothing is right. She does everything wrong. Maybe, just maybe, nothing has been right between them for long before these awful days.  Cancer does not always bring out our best.

There are some who look healthy, like me.  See me anywhere else, and you wouldn’t guess that malignancy may lurk beneath the surface and knives and poison are the tools of treatment.  Yet here they sit, and here I am waiting to walk down to infusion.

Worst on my heart are the parents leading their teenage child to a chair.  They ask gently if she needs anything. Their worried broken hearts are there for all to see.  I am a weeper and have to control myself.  I think of Anya and Rachel and Ketl. I wonder who really has it harder: me under the knife and needle or they able to do nothing but watch and hold my hand.  I wish the parts we play on no one.

So there waiting to “check out”, holding back the sobs, the sobs for me, for them, I do the only thing I know.  I pray.  I don’t even know what to pray for—certainly healing, certainly hope and light, certainly.  Mostly I invoke compassion.  “Lord, let them feel love: Yours, those around them, these healers working so hard, and mine, rouse my compassion.”  I have nothing else.

I no longer even can make sense of most prayer.  Does God not know?  If more prayers go up, does God hear more clearly?  If no one prays, what?  Mark Twain wrote a hilarious short story in which everybody in one small town who prayed had their prayers answered: one farmer’s rain blessed rice field floods his neighbor, an overly heated young man gives his aging neighbor pneumonia when his request for a cold spell is answered, a cheating boyfriend is struck down in the street, etc. etc. 

Even in the Scriptures themselves, the inspired writers express confusion when prayers are answered. Israel prays for purity and reformation (Make Israel Great Again???).  God sends the Babylonians to answer their prayers, and their temple is burnt, their walls are shattered, and they are carried away from the very land God promised to them.  Habbakuk wonders:

God, you chose Babylonians for your judgment work?
    Rock-Solid God, you gave them the job of discipline?
But you can’t be serious!
    You can’t condone evil!
So why don’t you do something about this?
    Why are you silent now? (Habbakuk 1:12-13)

All prayer seems, inevitably, to fail.  Everybody “checks out” despite our prayers for healing.  When that happens we walk away from our convictions that God answers our prayers and spew pious bumper stickers that we think make better sense of our disappointment: “Well God’s ways aren’t our own.” “God needed another angel.”  “He’s in a better place.”  “She’s not suffering now.” “God has a plan, even if we can’t see it.” Yuck.  Why do we try to avoid the pain and uncertainty?  Why do we avoid the rage?  Aren’t we human?  Didn’t we see on that Friday afternoon so long ago what ‘human’ really looked like?  What ‘human’ really costs?  Our God didn’t sugar coat it with pious claptrap.  He hung crying, asking why he’d been abandoned.

Yet even still, what comes unbidden to me is prayer: “Lord, let them feel love.”  The despair is real, but then so is the only task we have: “Let them feel love.” I plead for love and to be love for others because I have known its power for me.  I lived in it on a long walk across Spain.  I see it in the eyes of my wife, the calls from my children, the cards from church, the prayers of friends, and in the stories, the ancient stories. Even if I don’t quite understand why they are not real for us here in the waiting room.  Stories of sight for the blind, hearing for the deaf, healing for the afflicted. Those stories, don’t make sense to me right now, but they do tell of prayer in the midst of despair and the warm human touch of the love of God.

So, “Lord, let them feel Your love, and maybe ours too.  Please could you show us again how to be love.”  That’s my only prayer in that awful place, that waiting room.  

Buen Camino