In a concrete parking lot under a street light....my mind is working too hard again, churning over the old gloomy questions, like... Are there problems that are too big to solve, too many decades old and deep to break? Is there grief beyond the power of miracles?
I put my car in gear and leave the parking lot for the nursing home, where we don't normally have a lot of medical drama. We have drama, just not medical drama. But tonight at about 2 am...
The lady's blood pressure rises to 220. Her heart has worked too hard for decades, and now it's outdoing itself in a flurry of dangerous pressure. Soon the chest pain starts.
We try to make her comfy in one of the armchairs around the TV out in the dusky lounge. I bring the little brown bottle of nitroglycerin, the drug that we learned about in school. The little white pills are smaller than a grain of rice! I sit on the arm of the chair beside her chair. I pour a few of the pills into the bottle cap. I pick one up between two fingers, like a baby grasping a cheerio. It almost escapes. I slip it into the woman's mouth and tell her to let it melt under her tongue.
It seems so ridiculous...trying to stop a blood pressure freight train with a feather-weight pill. Will this little melting dot reach through her mouth, down to heart? What are the odds that it will have the power to shut off the chest pain, to restore a heart overworked for decades? This should be hopeless.
We wait five minutes, and give another one. At the end of ten minutes, she falls asleep. I take the blood pressure a bit later and it's dropped from 220 to 160.
And God asks me why I don't believe in redemption when medicine can restore old, over-worked hearts in minutes. When a white pill that could get lost in the carpet performs a miracle before my eyes. A pill so much less powerful than the word of God.
Thank you God for the allegory in the armchair, my favorite kind of story, minutes after I asked the question. Your nitroglycerin, unexpected, powerful, full of peace.
