Fractures

 

This past week I learned a lot. Before I left the world behind me for my home away from home in the bliss of India I had a list of things I wanted to figure out, meditate on, tie up some knots and ship 'em out in the manner of prayer or however. But the list sat in my prayer journal, untouched, all week. Yes, I prayed. Probably more than I have in a long time.

Last Sunday morning in India my students who were in class VI when I taught at the school there were preparing to travel home because they had just finished their class X metric exams Friday. They found me out on the porch of the guest house where WWU nursing students were soundly sleeping. I had been in the middle of my devotion thought at 6am but had wanted the girls to say goodbye to me before they left. They asked if I wanted to cross the river with them and the rest of the girls dorm, but in the middle of my devotions I told them I'd stay back, but would meet with them again someday soon. 

It wasn't but thirty minutes later and news had reached the guest house that some girls fell of the bridge and were hurt. The nursing students who were awake grabbed first aid kits and gloves and headed down to the river. I couldn't believe my eyes when I saw the bridge flapping in the wind. A cable had come undone and an entire side of the bridge gave out over fifteen feet of air above a dry river and was now swinging back and forth, back and forth. Nearly forty bodies had tumbled off making a human-like barricade through the sand and nurses made slings out of sheets and backboards out of bunk beds. It was two o'clock when I realized I hadn't eaten or drank anything all day. My hands started to shake like my head controlled my body. One of my friends and her husband had also been on the bridge with the girls when it collapsed. Her painful tears weren't so much from the pain of the fractured vertebrates that could be muted with pain meds as much as it was the pain of a broken heart. The ambulance had been called hours before and I sat with her after I had packed a bag with clothes and food for both she and her husband. These moans, I had heard before. They say, "what am I going to do? why did this happen? my life is plummeting? to where? why? how? it's over. all over." Then come the ifs, "If I would have been there. If I would have said that. If I would have seen this. If I would have trusted my gut." My eyes began to water, like my head controlled that too. 

After twenty some girls had been jetted from the school to hospitals all over the northeastern part of India with fractured arms and spines our group had a discussion about the incident. I remember feeling the same way I had felt nearly three months ago after knee surgery when I realized my gigantic tower of years of dreaming had too quickly vanished into dust and debris by the way side. Hard earned dreams that were ripped out from underneath in a matter of moments. So unfair. 

I'm reading Donald Miller's book A Million Miles In A Thousand Years. It's interesting, the way he introduces pain as a necessary element in stories: "When writing a story you put your characters through hell. You put them through hell. That's the only way they change." 

Without pain there is no joy. Without risk there is no meaning. Without conflict there is no change. Without ugly there is no beauty. How a sacrifice is the only way to perfection. No pain? No gain. No trial? No authenticity. 

Miller notes from a biography on Victor Frankl, an Austrian neurologist and psychologist who had suffered in a concentration camp, about pain: "Pain then, if one could have faith in something greater than himself, might be a path to experiencing a meaning beyond the false gratification of personal comfort." So then...

We don't know how much we are capable of loving until what we love has been taken away, until a beautiful story is ending. 

Unfortunate. But there's hope. What a crazy week. I'm awake at 2:00 am because in India it's 2:30 pm. I'm forcing myself to finish the pursuit of these thoughts and save it for another time.