Praytell

Friday, August 13, 2010

Shadowed Afternoon, Chippewa County

Minneapolis, Minnesota

Perhaps it is possible for you to not have a fallback position in life.  Perhaps everything goes as planned.  Relationships move along swimmingly well.  The trip to the hospital actually does yield a cure.  You have been prudent enough to suffer nary a financial loss, and have insurance that takes away all worry.  Perhaps you have never had to wonder what to do next, and what resources you have at hand.

Perhaps.

But I doubt it.

For most of us, faith, healing, and life itself is a matter of saying, “Well, I thought something else was going to happen.  It didn’t, and so, I’ve had to refigure my approach.  I’ve had to fall back on something else.

If the prayer doesn’t work, do you fall back saying that God’s ways are higher than ours, and so it isn’t that prayer didn’t work, its just that God had something else in mind.

If the cure isn’t found, do you fall back on heroic willpower to overcome the odds against you?

When positive thinking doesn’t change much of anything, do you fall back on trust?

When truth seems like a rehearsal of what has gone wrong, do you fall back on hope?

Just what do you fall back on?

And why?

And, more importantly, what have you learned from these unexpected fallbacks?

If you and I could name three, we might well have the story of our lives.

Some of them are fairly well known.

When disaster raises its hand, perhaps in the form of a chronic disease, we have a tendency to fall back on anger, then on denial, then on wishful thinking, then on will-power, and then, at long last, acceptance.

When priestly teachings say there is but one way, and perhaps even one chosen people, we fall back one the ways of wisdom that say, “Life has taught me something different.”  When we have found wisdom’s ways too complex, and entirely too unpredictable, we fall back on the prophetic that urges us to “do good” and “resist evil.”  And then, in Christianity, we fall back on grace itself as a divine blessing that accepts, forgives and even redeems.

In short, we fall back.

Sometimes we fall back on a vision.  Sometimes in the debate about just what a vision is, or even  a church should be, we fall back into some harbor of meaning that has come our way to say, “This is essential.  I’m not sure about that, but this is a keeper.”

Sometimes we fall back on vows.  “For better or worse, in sickness and in health, in plenty and in want,” I thee do wed.”

Often, I find, I fall back on trust.  I find that defining exactly who God is, or what God is, or what I believe, is a bit like whittling a stick until there is nothing left.  Belief tends to be finite.  Trust, on the other hand, seems to endure.  Yes, that is a setback.  But I trust tomorrow is another day, I trust a way can be found, I trust I am not alone.  I trust that impossible though it may seem, God actually is with us.  I trust that.

And you?

What have been your fallback realms of hope and healing?

I’ll bet they are many, and that each one tells a story as complex, and compelling as your life actually has been, is, and will continue to be.

Friday, August 6, 2010

Summer Study Winter Scene

Minneapolis, Minnesota

At heart, I am a scientist.  When our children were growing up, we’d often have discussion of “kitchen physics.”  Warm a coffee cup before pouring the coffee hinders the loss of heat, glass isn’t a solid, balance depends on a center of gravity, plumb lines never lie, and so on.  Drying dishes is an exercise in the inevitable transfer from wet to dry.  And so on.

Healing is, and must be, a scientific endeavor.  This pill does that.  That pill does this.  The surgeries our twins sustain this summer are both a matter of physics, as the mechanics of a knee and a foot are made right, or at least that’s our ever-so deeply shared hope.  Take oxygen away from a brain cell and it dies.  Period.

One would think, then, that places of healing might also operate with scientific precision.  In some cases, the assumption is exactly right.  Everything is part of cause and effect.  This is particularly true when it comes to billing.  Every shot, every visit, every meal, every IV, every test, every procedure has a code and a cost.  The more you do the more it costs.  There is nothing particularly evil about this.  The more groceries one buys the more it costs.  Nothing complicated about that.

It is unusual, even slightly miraculous, that there are places of healing in which nothing is quantified.  We call them churches, temples, synagogues, or mosques.  They are places of the spirit.  In then, there are some lines one will never hear.

“I prayed for you,” that will cost ten dollars.  “I prayed with you,” that goes for$20.  “I came to your home, and both talked with you and prayed with you, that will be $50, thank you.”  “We, the congregation hope all is well with you, share an awareness that these are indeed deep waters.  We have 100 members, each went out of his or her way, that is $5 a person, times 100, so the bill is for $500.”  “Do you actually think church coffee is free?  Well, it’s not.  It’s a buck a cup.  And cookies are 25 cents.”

You get my point.

Healing has a way of bypassing the science of accounting, the economics of cause and effect.

It is almost impossible to imagine any other economy operating by the rules of a spiritual community of whatever faith.  That tie?  What would you like to give?  Those paints?  Do something beautiful with them and they’re free.  Short?  Don’t worry about it.  Look at the birds.  Are they worried?  Invest in your soul, never cease in the giving of thanks.

It is so incredibly improbable, and so incredibly beautiful, these worlds in which we find meaning, friends, hope, and blessing.  Last night I was serving at the homeless shelter, touched once again by the many “thank yous” expressed for the free dinner, for the tomato choppers, the Stroganoff mixers, the lettuce washers.

The evening had costs.  That is scientifically certifiable.  So were the healings in that room, the brief dawns of hope and the fears that shelter stay might go on too long.

The sheer courage it takes to be giving and not count the cost, as one hymn puts it, is to be admired.  Turns out kitchen physics also apply to spiritual life as we who thirst seek out and receive the sacred waters of life itself.

Monday, August 2, 2010

Listening

Minneapolis, Minnesota

To love the art of healing, we rely on artists.

After my strokes, Judy Fjell, a songwriter whose love of music and people came to our house when I could not sing, much less speak.   I still did not quite know who I was.  But she did.  So she came, and helped me try to sing once again.  The sounds that came out of my voice were awkward, off kilter, arythmic and atonal.  She didn’t give up.  She knew there could be no recovery without music.  Even if there could be, what’s the point?

She later gave me a copy of an alblum called Zero Church, by Roach sisters.  It mesmorized me the first time I heard it, and has ever since.

One of the songs, written by Frankie Harris goes like this.  It was based on the words of a patient.

Hallelujah

dear most merciful God
humbly I approach your throne
of grace and mercy
thank you
for putting your hand in the midst
of our trials and tribulations
cause you bless me
so many times in the hospital
when I was afraid
hallelujah

dear most merciful God
hallelujah

How do we find these kind words, the encouraging word in the midst of life’s trials and tribulations.  Finding it is a deep and creative search.  Opinion,  a recitation of facts, and points of view will not suffice. We need something more that touches the heart, that moves the soul.  The Psalmists knew this.  Hymn writers know this.

But where are we to find it?

We must find teachers.  They are all around us.  Young clergy spend time interning in churches, which is a good thing.  But why not go wider?  Were I the leader of a PHE class, (my new invention–Pastoral Health Education), I’d start with  veterinarians.

We have had, and lost, several dogs in our life together.  Each time we went to the vet, I have been so touched by their appreciation of the grief we carried.  Funeral directors have that too, but it’s different.  They’re supposed to do that.  Vets just do it.  Their words, their kind touch on the dog we would no longer have, their awareness of our sorrow, all of it has been beautiful, meaningful, and well-done.  We leave knowing our grief is shared, knowing we have been fortunate to have had Casey, Ruthie, and Tango.

“Go to the vets,” I’d say.  Go and listen.  Go and feel.  Go and watch.  Go and learn how the right word is found and shared.  Go.”

We are surrounded by healers who have a heart for compassion and an ear for listening.

Go.

And when we return, let us give thanks.

Sunday, August 1, 2010

An "Out There" Healing

Minneapolis, Minnesota

The Sabbath dawns.  The air in the City of Lakes is humid and heavy, in need of a wind.  It being the Sabbath, the search for meaning takes us “elsewhere.”  We could stay home.  But instead we travel.  We get ready for church, or went to Synagogue, Temple, or Mosque, and go wondering what the sermon will be, what new insights will come our way.  We know before we go that the service will end with a blessing, asking that the gift of  hope will stay with us in the week ahead.

This notion of “going somewhere” to deepen our alliance with life intrigues and inspires me.

In my writing, and my living, I find healing an organizing thought.  I do so because my life, and lives of my wife and four now-grown children, are all about healing rather than fixing.  Their chronic conditions grow worse.  We see a difficult handwriting on the wall.  “You don’t get it,” a neurologist once said to me while showing me the MRI of my brain after the first stroke.   “Those cells are dead.”  That can’t be fixed.  Well, I thought, that may be true but what about healing?  How do I learn to live with something I didn’t choose?  How do my wife and children do that?  What kind of healings will we find?

And, most important of all, where is hope?

It lives, but not in places we would expect.  We expect to find it at the hospital, and sometimes we do as a new liver kicks in, a new kidney, a new vein or artery.  But the “fix” is often no more than a prelude to healing.  We must learn to live with heart disease, with the new leg, with an ailing kidney.  This happens over time “out there.”

“Out there where?” you may ask.

“Just out there,” I’d respond.

Out there where friends say, “You’re back.”  Out there where congregations await us.  Out there where we care, we intervene, we learn, we listen, we forgive, and we outgrow magical thinking.  Out there where there isn’t a bill for every prayer, an extra charge for a visit, out there beyond the walls defined by walls that expect everything can be fixed.  Out there.

There is a discipline known as Clinical Pastoral Education (CPE).  One must take its training to be a chaplain, or, as one hospital CEO refers to them, a “surgeon of the soul.”  The training is intensely focused on the patient in the ER, those who are in the hospital more than a day or so.  But it is also intensely focused on the practitioner.  It is, in the end, a form of psychotherapy, asking us to carefully explore our faith, our opinions, our biases.

But it is devoid of time.  And it happens in a clinical setting.  Therein lies the problem.  Healing resides elsewhere.

Living into the implications of our chronic conditions happens “out there.”

This is not news to you.  But what a conversation it would be if you and I spent an hour or so ferreting out the healing moments of your life.  We would laugh, feel our emotions deepen, sometimes shed a tear or two, and find a healing thread.

CPE is fine.  But what I call Healing Pastoral Education is better.

Wednesday, July 7, 2010

O Healing River

Minneapolis, Minnesota

In search of an organizing idea, almost anything will work.

Once the theme is accepted, it is easy to know what we “do” and what we do not “do.”  Quakers do peace.  Catholics do mass for other Catholics.  Once we know the theme we know both what and who are in, and what and who are out.  We must organize our perceptions.  If we don’t, there are too many options, too many possibilities, too many colors, too many details to make sense of life.  Painters learn to go with shapes, not objects.  Only this way can the painting be sufficiently simplified to make sense.

And so I’ve been wondering about church.  What are the organizing themes of churches?  I ask the question with a bit of experience.  For 13 years I interviewed nearly a thousand churches and mission agenies each year.

“What are you doing?” I’d ask.

“Restructuring,” they’d often say.

“Oh dear,” I’d say to myself.  “That means mission isn’t happening.”

But sometimes they knew exactly what they were up to.

“Hospitality,” said one church in upstate New York.  They wondered what it means to practice hospitality.  They knew there were homeless men, women and children in the neighborhood, but didn’t know their names or just what might be done.  Hospitality lead the way.  Ministry became urban ministry.  Then they wondered about men and women who had been excluded from worship because of their sexual orientation.  They extended hospitality. Next a new wave of migrants passed through.  What does it mean to show hospitality to an illegal immigrant?  Over and again, they kept the question of hospitality alive, learning that hospitality is a form of worship.   As soon as someone was excluded, they knew they’d somehow erred, that hospitality meant reaching out, making amends, listening with an open heart.

Their story impressed me.

Not long ago I accidentally visited a church that had chosen forgiveness as its theme.  Just what does it mean to forgive?  What do you do when it is easier said than done?  Does forgiveness mean overlooking evil?  Isn’t it more than “I’m okay you’re okay?” On a Sunday evening several hundred people attended a forum on forgiveness, something that each and every one of them, and us, is working on.

What are the themes of a church?

Three immediately come to mind:  preach, teach, and heal.

I love the first one, but am cautious.  It inherently empowers the preacher who seems to know something others don’t yet know.  Those years of seminary training aren’t for nothing.  “The Hebrew word for this is . . . we say to a mostly non-Hebrew reading congregation.”  Teaching carries the same risk.  Is there a class without an agenda of some kind?  Note that both teachers and preachers stand at the front of a mostly seated class.  I’ve got the information, hope you get it.  Nevertheless I love them both, and their meld of necessary sharing, responsibility, and perhaps even a measure of well-controlled control.

But healing.

That’s a different story.  None of us are well.  Some are afflicted by circumstance, some by disease, some by bad decisions, some by the errant arrows of chance.

If all a church did was to heal . . . what would that mean?

For you?

For me.

For us.

Friday, May 21, 2010

Emphasis in the Pyrenees

Minneapolis, Minnesota

There are times I find myself just a few steps away from a mixture of fury and sadness.  It happens whenever I begin to write about the marriage of medical care and money.  I do not understand a system that saves your life and then breaks your back.

It eludes all that I hold dear.  It cannot be wished away.  It cannot even be prayed away.  Moving mountains is nothing compared to untying the Gordian knot of money and medicine.

And, of course, my perception has a blind spot.  The very “system” I decry is the system that has saved my life not once, but many times.  Had I been born before the era of insulin, my life would have ended at my seventh birthday.  Every morning, as I hold two bottles of insulin, I am thankful for Eli Lilly, for Drs. Banting and Best who discovered it, and the truck drivers who haul it from Indianapolis (or wherever) to my drugstore.

And I’m thankful for the stent in my heart that allows blood to flow as it was intended to flow.  Without it all would have ended on my 40th year, and then again in my 50th year.

And so, it behooves me to share a kind word.

But in each case, the “fix” could not be a cure.  Diabetes and cardiac disease continue each day and every day, with an assortment of hills, valleys and complications.  Which is to say . . . the “fix” has very little to do with healing.  Healing is quite another thing.  Healing happens “out there.”  Healing happens as we learn to incorporate what we learned from a life-changing and life-threatening diagnosis.  Healing has almost nothing to do with emergency rooms, and frightfully expensive medical care.  Healing happens sometimes almost accidentally, sometimes intentionally, and always over a long period of time.  At the end of our time it is always spiritual, always personal, and always unique.

And so I ask for a change not in content but in emphasis.  Our medical systems need all the help they can get from the communities that receive us after our diagnosis–our churches, our families, our places of work, our friends.  A change in emphasis would be the simple, but profound awareness, of their healing presence.

I recall a parishioner who had a heart by-pass.  I visited him in the hospital.  A few weeks later I asked him if he’d been walking.  “Yes,” he said.  “Every morning at 6:00.”  “I’m coming out,” I said.  And so we met the next morning, and walked a mile or so as the dawn filled the sky and mountains with light.  I don’t remember what we talked about.  But it was the stuff of healing, for both of us.

I didn’t send him a bill or a medical code that would allow insurance companies to pay for the trip to his place or the theraputic blessings of the morning walk.  Where we heal, you see, healings are free, pleasurable, and a joy.  They make up the very core of meaningful relationship.

If only the “fix” could be blessed by an awareness of just where it is we heal.

Emphasis.  I’ve been working on some paintings.  I’m still not sure what colors to use.  But then I realize, perfection is not the key.  Emphasis is.  What’s true for a painting is true for the art of healing.  And ministry.

Thursday, May 20, 2010

Something Wisconsin Said

Minneapolis, Minnesota

One day things seem to be fine.

Or, better said, one day some things seem to be fine.

The search for a job has gone on too long, the offerings too few, the jobs available offer neither hope nor security.  Each interview is a “big deal,” full of promise and the realization that echoes in one’s soul, “I could do that.  And that.  Give me  a chance.”

I write not about myself, here, though I know the rhythm well.  I write of an acquaintance who shows up each week to ask of the weekly text, “What does it mean?”  Before the discussion he had something to share.

“I had a heart attack,” he said. “Just like that, I had a heart attack.”

“What did they do?”

“They put in a stent.”

He could just as well have said, “They saved my life.”

And here he was, a few days later, reading a text and figuring  out what it has to do with an oil spill, mean-spirited politics, his life, our lives, life in general.  With gratitude the opening prayer gave thanks for his life and the chance to save it.

Not long ago, in Minnesota, he had some health coverage.  But then the governor read the books with the precision of an accountant, and decided the budget had to be balanced no matter what.  Anybody single, and without children, would be ineligible for continuing coverage.  They were on their own.  That was the end of that.

I do not know the cost of a stent.  But it is a pretty sum, of that I am sure.  He was in the emergency room.  Then they must have pushed a tube up his arteries to see just where the blockage was, and then another one to insert the stent.  And then there is pay for the hospital stay in and of itself.  (The cost of jello in a hospital puts the cost of rare wine to shame).  Let’s say we’re up to $25,000 at this point.  I’d be glad to say that’s too much, but my guess is I’m not far off.

“I don’t have any coverage,” he said.  “I did, but . . . ”

“It’s not your fault,” I said to him.  “It is so important that you believe that.  Nobody can pay a hospital bill without insurance these days.  It’s not your fault you don’t have coverage, it’s not your fault you have a bill you cannot pay on your own.”

There is shame in not paying bills.

A woman beside me who works on health-care advocacy, says it utter clarity, “It’s a sin,” she said realizing how he had been thrown out into the cold through no fault of his own.

A life saved turns into a debt rather than a gift of life.

Who knows how it will settle out.  Not me.  Perhaps the hospital will cover the cost.  There are always “problem patients.”

For now, I rejoice in a life saved.  And once again I find myself vehemently opposed to the lethal embrace of money and medicine.

This story shared here happened in Minneapolis.  And, today, it happened somewhere in Dallas, Newark, Biloxi, Seattle, Great Falls, Cheyenne, August, Honolulu, and Cedar Rapids.  It is a common text waiting for us to ask the same question we bring to the text each week, “What does it mean?”

Sunday, May 2, 2010

Minneapolis, Minnesota

Five days in a hospital can’t help but make not one impression, but many.  Sifting through them leads me to share that, overall, I’m both impressed and vexed.

Impressed that when we needed an orthopedic surgeon on a Saturday morning in nearly the northernmost outpost of Wisconsin, one was available.  He looked at the x-rays, saw the ball of my father’s femur that had snapped in two and said, “We can fix that.”  A stainless steel ball would work just fine.  It would be attached to the femur and my dad would walk again.  “With a U-Haul trailer hitch in his hip?” I quipped.

And so, here specifically, I am impressed.  The anesthesia worked.  The operation worked.  They knew what to do, and they did it well.  Over and done.  In and out.  Fixed.  Repaired.  Here’s the bill.

But this favorable impression began to fade, only to find another.

There were nurses, two in particular, at the Memorial Medical Center in Ashland, Wisconsin, who were attentive, caring, present, and happy.  They bonded with my dad, and with me.  We were all on a first-name basis after the first day.  “Hi, Lynn.”  “Hi, Larry.”  When I said my dad might prefer smoked whitefish to the somewhat drab menu, she said she had a freezer full of smoked and fresh fish because her son works for a fisherman, and she hoped he’d continue in that line for the next few decades.  When I say, “drab,” menu I do not mean thoughtless.  The hospital procures its chickens locally, and its fish.

We felt enfolded in the healing presence of nurses.  We were, and are, both grateful for their care.

But where were the doctors?

They failed to appear.  Their presence was utterly missing.  I’m sure they “got reports” on progress, but they were missing in follow-up action.  One day, a colleague of the surgeon appeared.  He knew nothing about my dad, and was clearly putting in an appearance for the sake of a bill (forgive my cynicism!).  Would the trip home be safe? I asked him.  It was clear he didn’t care.

The surgeons, you see, had a one hour window of intersection with the life of our family.  One hour.  Then they were through.  Done.  Finished.  Over.

As soon as the healing began, the profession checked out.

Now my cynicism rises to the surface once again.  We know how to bill for intervention.  We do not know how to bill for healing.  And so those who actually bless it, the nurses, are paid almost nothing in comparison to the doctors.

Would it be too much to ask a surgeon to stop by for a cup of coffee with the patient two days after the surgery?  Yes?  Why?

The nurses wished us well.  They said good-bye, and said they’d miss us.  We’d miss them too.  In Madison, it was nurses who received us.  The doctor dropped by the next day, and then left.

And so . . . Overall I’m impressed.  And overall I’m vexed as the industry of medicine once again eclipses the ever so relational gift of healing.

Soft walking,

Larry

Tuesday, October 27, 2009

Asuncion, Paraguay

I do not speak Spanish.

When I try to speak it just a bit I keep breaking into French, assuming that since it is also a Romance language all will be well.  It’s a nice idea, but it has yet to work.  And so I do as best I can, and end up reading emotions and looking for an occasional word of understanding.  I do not know exactly what kind of tree it is that drops its purple blossoms on the playground, but I appreciate its language as the sunlight streams across the red sand.  It is emotional translation.

And so it was at a meeting with the secretary of Health for the district of Asuncion, the most populous district in Paraguay.  Paul, who spent three years launching Maestra which brought health services to government clinics that had some rudamentary medicines but no medical care, had called her and she agreed to the meeting.  It would be important, because, for whatever reason, the program came to an end.  Chalk it up to misunderstanding if one is charitable, or turf battles if one is less than charitable.  Either way, the end is the same.

But the doctor, the receptionist and the nurse decided that what they began would continue to serve those who had nowhere else to go.  And so they incorporated.  I saw the papers.  Five pages of very legal looking papers.  And they opened an account with a micro-lending bank.  And they were ready to roll.  They weren’t asking for pay, they were just asking for the medications the government had once supplied, and perhaps some gas money, I don’t know.  As I said, I don’t speak Spanish.

The meeting went well, as all meetings do, for the first few seconds.  But then the tone changed.  There were problems.  I didn’t know what.  And I didn’t know if they were true.  But something was amiss.  It wasn’t a small snag.  The line was about to break.  This I knew.

Suddenly the receptionist spoke.  I don’t know what she said.  As I said, I don’t speak Spanish.  But she spoke with passion, with intensity, with clarity and utterly without apology or shame.  There was dignity in her words.  It was, perhaps, as though a teacher, a caring teacher, had asked for her homework and instead of hanging her head in shame and saying, “I didn’t do it,” the student could say, “I’ve already turned it in.”  Each word spoken was received.

Then the doctor spoke.  She was not careful, but caring in what she said.  She spoke with authority that is born of truth and compassion.  She spoke as physicians speak when the topic is difficult but needs to be embraced.  She did not speak for long.  She did not have to.  Every word was received.

And then the nurse spoke.  I don’t know what she said.  As you know, I do not speak Spanish.  Her words were the words of a nurse.  Their tone matched the tone I heard the nurse use when she greets patients who have come for their meds, come to see the doctor, come to see if their child is going to be okay and if all is well with the pregnancy.

And then Paul spoke.

I do not speak Spanish but I knew what he said.  The past is the past.  Maestra is over.  Phoenix is now here.

The tide turned.

In a moment the tide turned.  The secretary had said what she needed to say, indeed what she should have said given what she thought was true.  But she saw a new day at hand.

I said, in English, that I would do whatever I could with the gift of a pen to bless her work, that I had done so in Romania, Lithuania, Russia, and writing about health all over the world.  In an instant she produced one, two, three, four, five, six reports showing what her department was doing.  It was impressive.  The figures were impressive.  All those statistics.

“They need a story,” I said.

“Come,” she said.  We all stood up from the table and crossed the red driveway to a large warehouse full of medicines for the people of Paraguay.

A contract would be signed.

I understood perhaps 25 words in Spanish during the entire morning.  But it is emotional language that tells the story.

And it is a story of hope.

The Red Road of Healing

Wednesday, October 28, 2009

Asuncion, Paraguay

The roads were red.

Sometimes they were red sand.  When it rains, they become red rivers that cut into the soil, even where stones have been pounded by hand into the sand to make a sort of pavement.

Along the way there are piles of red stone waiting to be pounded into pieces not with a machine, but with a sledge hammer.  And then, piece by piece, they are pounded into the road and begin their wait for a rain heavy enough to move them a bit.

The road had no name to speak of.  But the clinic had a sign with the name of the village that stretched along the dirt road.  Canadita it read.  And then the key word, “Salut.”  The clinic is one of eleven or so that the Phoenix program now works with.  The clinic was always there, but it was simply a dispensary where government subsidized medicines are sold to those who live along these roads.  When Paul Jacquay and Marianne Shomaker came to Paraguay, they wondered if it would be possible to provide a physician and some nurses in these locations.  Seemed like a good idea.  So it happened.  The government was pleased.  The mission for which they worked was pleased.  The denominational executives had good reason to be pleased.

But then life happens.  Without casting blame . . . does it do any good to blame snags when one is fishing for life?   . . . it came to an end.  Paul and Marianne returned to the states.  But the three staff who staffed those clinics along the red roads of Paraguay, decided to endure.  And endure they did.  The word “endurance” has a twin.  It’s name is sacrifice.

And so, without pay, they drove the rural roads.  The doctor’s sister said she would take care of the doctor’s child because the doctor could no longer afford child care.  To endure is to sacrifice.

There is no trace of this stress at the Canadita’s health clinic.  The people walk down the road, sit on a bench beneath a shade tree, and then walk into the clinic where the receptionist greets them kindly, the nurse asks how they are doing, and the doctor takes out her stethoscope.  Mothers bring their little ones.  Pregnant women wait in line to make sure everything is fine.

For three hours, the clinic is open.  When it is time to close, there is no need to shoo people away.  Everyone knows when it closes, and the afternoon has grown hot.  It’s time to head home.  Groups of school kids kick a soccer ball down the road, trying to steal it from each other.  The chickens get out of the way.  At the small house, with its bright laundry, the cows have moved to the shade.

We leave.

There is another clinic, this one open a bit later.  It also has the pharmacy it always did have.  But today it also has a receptionist, a nurse, and a physician.  There too there are benches in the shade.  There too there is no pushing, no josteling.  There too the clients know each other, and there too they are known by the doctor, the receptionist and the nurse.

It is a good thing.

Healing always is.