Dear Church Family,
Earlier this year I wrote about the three core spiritual needs and how we can meet them for one another.
A patient I saw at Children’s Hospital, as I was bringing Godly Play stories there last week, reminded me of what it looks like when one of these needs is really met well: the need for meaning and direction. I approached the patient thinking we’d talk about suffering but she had something else to talk about. She was a wise young woman, focused and sure, and I learned (again) the perils of approaching someone with an agenda
I usually volunteer with the kindergarten set, but the chaplain sent me last week to visit a 19-year old, whom I’ll call Jill. She was eating chicken nuggets for breakfast at 2 PM. I asked her how the food was, and she shrugged. “Meh.” But she mustered up some enthusiasm for my story. The story was the Parable of the Sower, and I was SO ready to engage this with a teenager. It was going to be so exciting to work with someone who was old enough to see it my way — who sees the seeds thrown out on the path, the rocks, the thorns, and the good soil, and realizes that she is a seed of life, currently struggling on the rocks of cancer. I couldn’t wait to bring out all my big ideas. Ha.
Well, I told the story, moving the paper pieces around on the felt, and came to the end where we wonder. She jumped right in to interpret it:
“The moral is be careful. Choose where you put your energy.”
I still thought I could get Jill to see the story my way. I prompted:
“Like the path… I wonder what the path could be?”
She smiled as she said “well, you can’t be upset if you put your seeds on the path and the birds eat them. Birds eat birdseed. That’s their nature.”
“And the rocks…?”
“That’s like the hard part in life. Where you’re struggling.”
I waited, smiling encouragingly, for her to say “this is my life: I’m suffering.” I had my agenda. But darn it, she wasn’t going to say it.
“And the good soil over here is when you decide what you’re doing and you do it right.”
I gave up. She wasn’t going to follow my prompts. But I sat back and listened as she started chatting.
“I miss this kind of thing, you know. Like school, and Sunday school… like this thing where we just talk about ideas and apply them to our lives. I don’t get enough of it these days.”
She kept talking and talking. She pushed her meal tray to the side and started talking with her hands, telling me stories. We found ourselves reliving high school band drama:
“I could’ve been the drum major if I hadn’t gotten distracted. I tried to help a friend but it backfired. I should’ve stayed in band and stayed focused. But what can you do? Sometimes you try to help someone and they just take and take and take.”
We went back to the first weeks of college, before her diagnosis:
“I took four classes. But it was too much. I assumed I should take twelve credits, but oh my GOD it was too much. I just couldn’t.”
We talked about next year:
“They said I can come back one class at a time. I want to be a bookkeeper. So I might not even get a diploma; I can do certificates. Math classes come first. I’ll stay focused.”
We talked about tomorrow:
“Chemo starts at midnight or something. First they do the pre-meds and then I ask for the Benadryl so I can sleep through the rest of it. But my most important job is to drink lots of water and flush the drugs back out of my system again. That’s my mission.”
Her energy waning, silence fell.
She reached down and patted the story, still spread out on her bed in felt and paper pieces. She took the little basket piece – the bushel basket of harvested seeds – and put it in the Sower’s arms, and smiled.
Finally the connections rushed into my mind. I had been so blinded by my own agenda. But she had been talking to me for twenty minutes, now, and her stories were all on topic. The drama in band was the birds on the path, eating the seeds — “it’s just their nature, they’ll eat it up” — why give them your precious seeds if you don’t want them to take them? The first weeks of college were the rocks, the struggle. Threading a future path through diplomas and certificates was like the thorns — making sure to clip and prune your way through. And the good soil was her clear mission for the day: water, rest, Benadryl, rest, heal, grow.
Jill’s experiences glimmered over the colored felt and paper pieces like a shining spiderweb of story. I tried to say something (anything) but I couldn’t do it justice. She had just woven a masterful set of connections for me. In her illness she was working so hard on this spiritual need: how do I know where to spend my energy? And every part of this story re-told a life lesson hard won. I mustered up a humble closing prayer:
“Thank you, God, for helping Jill to know what is important and to make careful choices.”
Meaning and direction is about doing the next right thing. You don’t have to know what you’re doing in ten years. You don’t have to see all the way down the path. But your life unfolds like a walk in the dark, and you can use your values like a flashlight. Jill’s flashlight was illuminating baby steps, not giant leaps, but the light of her beam was clear and focused. I learned from her and I hope you can too.
Every Blessing,
Talitha