Place

Maybe it's being in a different place that makes me think of my surroundings as a setting, that helps me actually look at what is going on around me and notice the stories that are unfolding...

Ryan and I have spent a great deal of time in hospitals in the past year, specifically a lot of time in Intensive Care Units.

On December 6th I was at a press conference and anniversary celebration for work that was taking place on the Hill. I was scurrying around putting together a powerpoint, ensuring A/V needs were met and that all would go off without a glitch. I made note cards with pronunciations of ambassadors names and set my boss up for success. I met dignitaries and senators and celebrities. It was really quite an affair. My boss' wife reserved a really nice hotel room for me right in downtown DC, but I just had this gut feeling that I needed to leave. Really, it was no big deal because a few others were headed back to Norfolk that evening. A couple of us left the reception with a lady that works for the PR firm that we use. She was going to take us to a car we had left in a nearby garage. When I opened my purse and looked at my phone I saw that I had missed 13 calls from Ryan. My heart sunk, I knew something terrible had happened.

Ryan told me that his college roommate had been in a really terrible accident and was med evac'd to a hospital in northern Virginia. Ryan was on his way to DC. I told the people in the car what had happened and asked what the fastest way for me to get to the hospital was. The PR lady said she lived 2 blocks from the hospital and she would take me straight there.

I will never forget that night. It was terrifying. The next hours at the hospital were painful beyond words. The faces of family and loved ones, the pain and grief. Watching Jack's distraught, caring girlfriend who paced gripping her Bible. There was a lot of sitting, sitting and observing scenes and faces and people that have become snapshots in my mind.

Ryan and I spent so many weekends in DC through the winter. We celebrated tiny triumphs and mourned over the pain and brokenness and what for a while seemed, at least to me, fairly hopeless.

Those countless hours in the Trauma ICU waiting room were inexplicably painful, excruciating even. Really all we could do was sit and wait and see. See. As time progressed I felt like I was slowly being nudged in the direction of realizing that a much bigger story was unfolding. My eyes were being opened to a story in which beauty and the mess were so inextricably intertwined, a story in which love was hard to define and understand but incredibly easy to see, a story which to an incredible degree portrayed the dynamics of hope.

This past weekend I found myself back in an ICU, this time a pediatric ICU with my little niece Brooke. This time I sat it in the waiting room with my eyes open, watching the story at hand unfold. And it was a truly beautiful one.

Her heart defect was tragic, in the greatest sense. But it is healed, covered, new. How powerful, how beautiful, how hopeful. And what I love so much is that all of the heartache and fear and worry are being redeemed, being used for good. I love that her story will be told as a story of hope, of newness, of freedom. Her story is a story of things not being as they seem, a story of a way being made in the face of despair. A way being made for hope.

That first night in the Trauma ICU with Jack I was standing with my soon to be sister-in-law. I remember saying to her that hospitals are such scary, terrible places. She looked at me and replied, "Yes, but also places of such great triumph." I am so incredibly grateful that that is true.

See, I am doing a new thing!

Now it springs up; do you not perceive it?

Isaiah 43:19