Setting Our Broken World Right

Setting Our Broken World Right

This afternoon, as we waited for the results of my husband’s MRI and CAT scan, I looked around at the light flooding through Mayo Clinic’s wall of windows, at the pigeons pecking the flat roof of the building below, at the sick, desperate people sitting in chairs, waiting the same as we were, and I thought, “This entire city is built on brokenness, but one day we will live in a city that is whole.”

It’s hard for me to be in a hospital, but I realize it’s not a cakewalk for anyone. People’s emotions are heightened, as our mine, and I literally feel their pain, fear, resignation, and love. It’s beautiful and overwhelming at once, and I let it wash over me—soaking it all in, watching everyone, trying to understand the brokenness that is inside my fellow man—a brokenness which is mirrored in me.

I want to understand people. Draw closer to them. Empathize with them. Love them more deeply, more perfectly, for I view my husband’s MRI and CAT scans like a yearly perspective realignment.

If you ever want to get your priorities in check, visit a hospital like the Mayo Clinic, where—despite the beauty and the grandeur and the intelligence congregated inside those marble halls—you see people from all nationalities fighting for their lives.

It will change you. It will break your heart. It will make you want to hug everyone you meet. But, the thing is, today, I didn’t hug or reach out to anyone.

I saw a little blond girl, first thing this morning, who was with her older sister and dad. Her sister was having an MRI. She gave her birth date at reception, and she said she was born in 2003. A teenager. Why? Why can’t our bodies even make it through puberty without falling apart?

I saw that teenager’s little sister again, in the waiting room. She slept for a while on a chair and then grabbed a tabloid from the table beside me, where I was reading. I looked up at her, but she didn’t meet my eyes.

What was I supposed to say? That it’s going to be all right? I didn’t want to spook her, so I remained quiet, in my own little bubble.

Another woman, later in the Gonda Building. She had short strawberry hair, a sundress, comfortable walking shoes, and a backpack. A tube snaked from a compartment on her hip up to her nose. She sat on a chair three yards from mine and put on ChapStick. She looked tired and scared.

I didn’t reach out to her, though. I just sat there and and prayed for a good outcome for her, for the little blond girl’s sister, for the people queuing up in front of reception (the line never stopped), and I imagined this endless line of broken people ribboning all around the globe, and it was one of the first times in my twenty-nine (nearly thirty) years when I became desperate for redemption.

For God to heal the sick and set our broken world right.

But then, after they called us back, and I sat in the chair and prayed, “I can have perfect peace because You love me perfectly,” I saw the miracle of that. Me, a fear-riddled woman, can reach a place where I know that God truly has the best plans for us as a family, for my husband, for the world.

So I will hold onto that miracle, that perfect peace until next year’s scans, and in the years to come. For things might move and shift in our lives—but God never does. And one day, He will come and heal us all.

(My husband’s scans looked good today. There’s one small spot they want to monitor, but the neurosurgeon is not overly concerned, so we will have another scan next year.)