New in Town

So in case I haven't mentioned it enough, I've been recently married. Two months today, actually. I know this, because I received an email from TheNest.com, a sequel to TheKnot.com. Their emailing intention was to help me with all of the things with which I must be struggling at two month of marriage. I can browse easy recipes, get tips about battling the post-wedding blues especially the ones related to wedding debt, and even buy The Name Change Kit for $29.95. I admit to you: their help isn't really relevant to me. I don't need their recipes. Our wedding is paid for, and my name is successfully Katie Banley for all major government and financial institutions.

People talk a lot about marriage being a difficult thing. Right now, I feel that there are a lot of hard things going on in my life, but marriage is not really one of them. My marriage is pretty much an escape from all of the hard things.

The most difficult thing between us was uncovered by a recent conversation in the kitchen. Generally, I have been feeling that there is no food in our house. Generally, Thomas has been feeling as though we have too much food in our house. Bread is an example of this. I have been buying bread, English muffins and a loaf of whole wheat bread here and there. Thomas sees this bread and feels pressure to eat it so that we can start fresh and obtain something new. "We have so much bread, so I'd better eat it all up." I don't understand this mentality. Neither do I understand how the bread could be gone every time I turn around. Conversely, Thomas doesn't understand how we could possibly have a continuous supply of the thing he's working so hard to deplete. I'm buying; he's depleting. I'm gathering; he's preparing for the hunt. Our efforts are thwarted by the other.

This is the extent of the difficulty between us so far. I can't discount anyone who says that marriage is difficult, though, because I can see how things outside of a marriage could easily become things between two married people. There are plenty of difficult things outside of us. At some point, they will probably come between us, and we'll have to work hard to resolve them.

Thomas and I get along very well. This is a blessing from God. Many people are married to someone with whom they don't get along. My brother says that marriage is something in your life that God has given to you to manage. For us, God has managed the getting along part already. We just do.

What I am trying to say is that everybody gets their own things to manage. I don't know how he decides, and I don't know that his methods measure up to our idea of fair. I saw a homeless woman asking for money on a busy Baltimore street the other day. I've seen a lot of homeless men on the Baltimore streets, and coming from the Midwest, I am moved every time. But seeing a woman in her thirties on the streets makes me wonder what's really happening. It makes me wonder what I'm doing with all of my time. We all need to be somewhere. We're like hamsters on steroids around here, peddling away on our impersonal wheels.

It's the strangest thing for me - feeling like I'm overstepping social norms to introduce myself to my neighbor. Have you seen New in Town? Maybe you should, because then you'd understand that in my heart, I'm just Blanche, the lady with the clipboard who brings over tapioca and asks:

"Have you found Jesus?" -Blanche

"I didn’t know he was missing" -Lucy

I am a new PICU nurse.

I am a new nurse in the PICU, and that means that my schedule often leaves me wondering what day it is, what time it is, and what to call the meal I'm eating. It's very disorienting coming home in the dark morning and seeing people fresh from showers getting into their cars for work or to see kids waiting for the school bus. It feels like night, and I am ready for bed, but it is really morning. Do you say, "Goodnight," before you go to bed at 8:30am?

I am a nurse, so I pretend to be confident, to have things together. But sometimes I feel as though I am walking in circles. Sometimes I really am. Parking... There are several parking garages, several randomly closed streets, and a mountain of traffic. Navigating... After I park in the correct parking garage and find the correct exit, there are several tunnels connecting buildings. I must find my unit in a matrix of unmarked hallways and dungeonous-looking corridors. I function mostly by intuition, and this makes navigation hard. Once I come to a fork in the path, I first try the hallway that just "looks right" or "feels right". One of my classmates recently decided that she should invent a GPS for inside buildings. I have sarcastic feelings about that. Things like, "Then we can really rely on technology instead of our brains." and "Then nobody ever has to know where they're going just like we never know people's telephone numbers." and "I think they already did that. It's called a map." Stuff like that. But the other part of me is honest with myself and thinks it's brilliant. Storing my lunch... I must say that this is a relatively easy task, and I think that I can confidently say that I have mastered it. Finding a bathroom... Very few toilets service all of our nurses and visitors. It's incredible, really.

I am a rookie, and that means that I make everyone else feel smarter. There are new orientees coming through every three months. So right now, we're the rookies, but in a month, we won't be. The rookies who just graduated from rookieship helped me fill out a piece of paper the other day. Then they looked at each other and started laughing, because somebody is finally dumber than they are. It's a good feeling.

I am a new nurse in the PICU, and that means that I am in shock. In nursing school, our patients were mostly alive. Usually, we could have conversations with them, take them for a walk, ask them about meals. Now, my patients are mostly dead. I might've already said this, but I used to think sick meant throwing up, pooping your guts out, etc. Now I realize that "sick" can mean unresponsive, deformed, brain dead. When I first got here, I wanted to wander around the unit in spare moments and see what else was going on. Right now, I am having trouble. When I walk around, I hate what I see. It catches me off guard and I am pricked at the unnatural body positions, unnatural facial expressions, unnatural portion of death among the living. Sometimes I come home, and I just lay on top of my husband and cry.

"Are you wiping your snot on my shirt?"

"Yes."

"Man, now I have to change shirts this week."

He says other things, too, that help me breathe and function. Simple things like, "Why does it have to be your goal for them to get better?" And it's profound, because some of them are not getting better and are not ever going to get better. If my goal is for them to get better, I fail. If I can change my goal to just love the poor, suddenly, my work is meaningful. Suddenly, I am doing something that matters deeply to my Savior. "Jesus said you'll always have the poor."

I am a new PICU nurse, and it means I'm functioning. It means I'm wondering if nursing is really the right career for me. It means I'm crying more than usual. It means I'm tired. It means I'm leaning on my people even more than usual. It means I'm hearing beeping in my sleep. It means I'm learning to take care of the sickest kids in the hospital. It means something, and that means everything.

Till we have faces, I don't see.

I went to church on Sunday, and it was a long awaited relief. This East Coast thing is very...different. I have not met my neighbors even though I've got two doors six inches from mine. I don't really expect to know their names unless I get really ambitious and introduce myself. Anonymity is the norm.

The people at church were warm, but not fake. We sat by an oncology nurse practitioner who began her career at my facility. Her husband is a techie and musician. They and their children are hoping to be missionaries in the Middle East by the end of the year. They invited us for bagels with their family after church. They've adopted a kid from Guatamala and have three of their own. They also invited us into their small group. I'm itching to be a part of it.

Anyway, church. The pastor's laying the groundwork for a series related to life's big question: Why? He's speaking about the question with words that relay that he's asked the question before like the rest of us. Simple words weren't enough for him either. He needed more like the rest of us.

It's a tough thing for a pastor to address. It would be so much easier to preach a sermon on prosperity or to get people all hyped up about God being alive and everything else. But he's taken it down a notch and pricked every heart. He's treading carefully, thoughtfully.

He advises us all to draw a closed shape like a circle or a square. It represents God's wisdom and knowledge. He asks us to shade in our portion of wisdom and knowledge. "Do you have a dot on your paper? Can you even see it? Maybe some of the answers to the why's lie within God's wisdom and outside yours."

I'm glad it's not the end of the series; it would be a real bummer. But it lays the groundwork. Why deformed bodies? Why beatings? Why brain death? Why trauma? We wouldn't be asking if we understood. But perhaps there is an answer. Maybe we don't have access to it.

Haven't you heard so many people say, "When I get to heaven, I'm going to ask..."? I stole this idea from this sermon. It was stolen for the sermon from some writer (CS Lewis?). Maybe when we get there, our knowledge and wisdom will brighten and all we'll say is, "Oh, I see."

"Now we see through a glass dimly, but then, face to face." It's my hope, and I'm hanging on.