Hospital Rooms
chapter forty-three from Misfit Table: let your hunger lead you to where you belong
Life is coming at me, and I can’t outwork or outrun the pain anymore.
Pain is winning.
I was at Office Depot when the pain rushed in, and it was more than I could handle. I doubled over, hit the floor, then realized I was out of Percocet. I called Dr. V first, and he told me to get to the emergency room at St. Joseph Medical Center. I called my mom, and she picked me up and drove straight to the hospital where I was admitted immediately.
It was as if I was in a scene in a movie. The rescue team put a tube in my chest to feed me, found a vein for the IV, and dosed me with narcotics.
It’s a relief now, laying here, left alone.
There are people here if I need them, and they help me without giving me something I didn’t ask for. They also don’t take anything from me. They don’t steal what I don’t have to give. And then there are the narcotics to numb the pain of it all.
Nurses and doctors come in and out, their mouths moving, looking concerned and squeezing my hand to reassure me. I don’t hear much of what they say anymore.
In the hospital, I realize I can’t pray anymore, not the way I want anyway. I can only listen. I just sit on the toilet, in the bed, wherever I am, and as the pain comes in waves, all I can manage is, “God, you are more than enough.”
I repeat it over and over.
I have been battling this disease for five years now. I’ve tried everything: long term steroids, Remicade infusions, injecting myself with Humira. All of it has made my body intolerant to the medications. Lately, even the narcotics have stopped working. I’m intolerant. Nothing kills the pain.
I’m embarrassed when Dr. V, my GI, asks me how I’m doing, if I’m getting help for myself, getting safe, getting a divorce. He knows about Jake and me, knows Jake doesn’t care for me in any real way. Dr. V validates my pain, my invisibleness.
He has seen inside my body many times. He sees what most people do not. He knows I hide my pain—physical and emotional. He also knows I am the last in line to take care of myself. He knows my entire life is an emergency, and my sickness doesn’t have my time. If I take care of myself, everyone and everything else will fall apart.
Dr. V tells me ulcers have spread up most of my colon. My body is attacking itself, and the risk of colon cancer is high. I won’t make it without surgery, and he can’t do anything else for me.
He tells me of a brilliant GI surgeon who specializes in JPOUCH surgery, where they surgically create a J-shaped reservoir out of my small intestine as an alternate way for me to store and pass stool. They would remove my entire colon. I would wear an ostomy bag for a year and a half while I wait to my small intestine to heal, he tells me.
He thinks I am a good candidate. It’s a major procedure, he says, requiring three major surgeries.
Colon cancer. Major surgery. Will I even live?
God, you’re not taking away the disease or the devastation, are you?
You’re not fixing Jake either, are you?
Little one, I’m not fixing you either. I’m making you whole, bringing you into my family. Remember, the story is going somewhere. Your heart is set on pilgrimage. It is in all the yeses that wholeness comes.
Fifteen years, Papa. I have believed for a miracle all that time.
Last night, the night before I was admitted into the ER, before my normal would change forever, I lay looking up at the moon from the window above my bed, full and bright against the black sky.
Not a star in sight. I traced it with my finger. A circle. I’ve run in lots of those.
I believed Jake would choose you. Choose help. I see how powerful our story could be together. If you saved a marriage like ours, you could save any marriage. But that doesn’t seem to be the plan.
I’m too tired to talk anymore, Papa. I want to sleep now. Before I do, though, I guess I should say my trust is all of everything I have. There isn’t anywhere safe to put it anymore. I want you to have it.
In that moment, the moon melts into my hospital room, filling it with liquid warmth. It’s as if I see Jesus’s hand reaching through that window, into my life, all the way back through my lineage, back to the original wound.
And he touches it.
I curl up in Papa’s presence, loved. Safely tucked in his arms. I sleep. Safe. Papa found me. He always knows where I am.
***
The world is a broken system full of fallen people with heart disease.
Little one, you cannot fix yourself or the people you love. You cannot fix Jake, or as painful as it is, your children.
We’ve got a log way to go, little one, yet we’ve come so far. I am in agony with you, watching you. I hurt where you hurt, ache where you ache. I stop breathing when you do. I hear your silent screams. Since the beginning, I have been watching your life unfold, cheering you on. I am here. I am waiting for you to let me help you heal. You are at the very end of yourself. Let me help you turn the corner. Let me help you make a hard right and begin to go a new way.
You are living in a fantasy world with Jake, thinking you might change him. You see what I’m showing you is true, yet you don’t believe it. Hear my voice. Keep acting on it. You’re not crazy, little one. You’re falling over the edge, but you haven’t hit the ground yet. My hands keep you suspended in midair.
I wait for you to choose. And the right choice might hurt momentarily, but because of me, you will rise. I know pain, but I also know resurrection. I know healing and wholeness.
Trust me and see what miracles I can work when my children say no to many things to say yes to me.
I see your pain. I am healing you, rebuilding your house. Not only your house, my love, oh, no. My love for you knows no bounds. You can never know how deep my love is for you.
Even now, I am running my finger over the circle of your life and your mother’s, grandmother’s, and great-grandmother’s lives, reaching all back through your family lineage.
I am touching the original wound, restoring it. I’m tearing down, setting you up with my gospel of put-back-togetherness. My gospel doesn’t bully from the outside, beloved, it emancipates you on the inside, see?
I’m binding up broken beauty. You will no longer be broken-hearted. You will be radically resurrected at the root.
—PAPA
***
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Too often the world speaks words of harm, and too often we believe them--and so we live stories God never intended for us. Yet God longs to rewrite and redeem your story.
Tiffini Kilgore, founder of the lifestyle and design boutique House of Belonging, grew up in a broken home before marrying at the tender age of sixteen. Years later, divorced and with three small children, she remarried. The seasons that followed brought two more children, another broken marriage, chronic disease, major surgeries, and cycles of abuse--leaving Tiffini feeling alone and unloved.
Hungry for healing and a safe space, Tiffini began seeking Jesus through journaling and soon found breadcrumbs of grace leading her down a new path. There, she found a rich table set for misfits just like her--a place of nourishment and restoration. Where she was fed lies of worthlessness, God fed her truth that she was his treasured daughter. Where she was told she was a helpless victim, God offered her the cup of his strength. Where she once held an empty future, God gave her hope and a fresh start. In cultivating an ongoing dialogue with her Abba Father, God transformed Tiffini's pain into passion, and ultimately, fierce belonging.
Tiffini writes as a modern-day mystic, with lyrical force and deep tending of the soul, in this book for anyone who has ever felt out of place or at odds in the world. Each chapter features compelling narrative as well as a poignant response from "Papa" God as Tiffini calls him, and the result is a stirring invitation to come home to where you belong. Come and sit, take and eat, and join the battle cry to take God at his word.
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