The Waiting Room of Mercy

The waiting room of Mercy
is a place with no address
where loved ones mix with strangers
and faint smiles mix with stress…
where whispers catch attention
and laughter goes unheard
as stares fix on a distant door
awaiting some new word.
The chairs in Mercy's waiting room
hold hope and hints of strife.
The time is measured not by clocks
but subtle rhythms of life…
like blinks held shut and breaths held in
and sighs in sync let go...
or pacing feet past eyes that meet
while scanning to and fro
in search of strength from "they that wait"
for hours turned to days…
till, if God wills, all trembling lips
give way to pent-up praise.
 ©Tom Kapanka 12-16-2018

These pictures were taken in place called Mercy Hospital, street address: 1500 E Sherman Blvd., but the above lines are also about a more abstract place that can be called "The Waiting Room of Mercy," a waiting room that calls us all at different times in life and in any place where we learn from "they that wait upon the Lord" in prayer and supplication.

The opening lines of the post were prompted by some hours I spent at Mercy Hospital this past Thursday night, awaiting the news regarding a senior at CCS who, in the peak of health and fitness, suffered a cardiac arrest in our school gym during a routine basketball practice. His teammates were the first to gather 'round him. They are seated in some of the pictures above. Thanks to his coach, the AED in our gymnasium, and the immediate arrival of our local first responders, this story has a very miraculous outcome, but that was unknown at the time of these photos.

The last photo is the moment that the boy's father first saw his dear friend, his son's coach, whose calm and trained response saved his son's life. I will post a video link to the good news that came over the weekend. In the meantime, here are two initial news articles from Friday and Saturday.
 Click on title below: 

Mlive:

 AED and quick thinking by coach credited with saving West Michigan teen’s life

Grand Haven Tribune

Coach saves player who collapses at practice

Do you want to hear something that has brought comfort over these past few days? The student in this story is a leader on our school praise team. With him, the student body has sung a song called "I will follow" by Jon Guerra (a friend of CCS) countless times. The praise team sang that song Thursday morning in chapel, not knowing what the afternoon held.

A year and a half ago, The Lakes Church made the CCS building their home. Pastor Todd Ballard is lead teaching pastor of the church. His office is upstairs near the gymnasium, and he often practices with our basketball team. This was the case Thursday. He had left the gymnasium when he heard all the commotion coming from the gym and hallways. Here are his opening remarks from this morning's message. 

Just three days after that announcement in church, WZZM 13 ran this story on the 6:00 News.

Calvary Christian School coach uses AED to save basketball player's life

"Even in the Storms I'll Follow You..."

In the post above, someone left a comment that brought this thought to mind... (post-time-stamped to sequentially follow)

The student who is the unnamed subject of that post is a key leader in our praise and worship rotation for chapels. There was a  time when he was reluctant to sing in public. In fact, we had to coax him to join two years ago. That's hard to imagine now. I mention this only to say that Luke and his fellow praise and worship leaders have led our students in singing "I Will Follow" countless times at Fall Retreat and chapels, and the special K-12 praise and worship times we do at the end of each quarter.

This song was sung by the praise team the morning of the incident. The first clip provides the lyrics; the second clip is more reflective of our student body singing along.

 

(Incidentally, Jon Guerra is married to Valarie Strattan, CCS Class of 2003. Together they are "Praytell," and they were in town performing at the Beardsley Theater the day this happened. Here is one of the songs from their Christmas concert that night.)

The Rhythm

The December 16 post above came to me Sunday morning before church as a cathartic process. Sometimes what I write in such times is never seen again. Sometimes it still makes sense years later. Sometimes my old drafts have subconscious influence on new thoughts. This was clearly the case with my thoughts of this weekend. "The Rhythm" was first posted in 2007 and explained somewhat in 2009. Similar thoughts were clearly at play in writing "The Waiting Room of Mercy," which echoed lines of  a post by that name in 2005. At any rate, the following is a nice companion piece for this week's events. It was posted December 17 but pre-dated to appear below the two posts above it.

The Rhythm

Life is danced to rhythms
we soon forget are there.
The blink of eyes, the beat of hearts,
the breath and sigh of air
are lost to cycles of the sun
and pass with little care.
They slip our mind as measures
in time until we're unaware
we wake t’thm, walk t’thm,
work t’thm, talk t’thm,
laugh t’thm, cry t’thm,
live t’thm... die t’thm.
It becomes a most ungraceful dance
when we ignore the Hand that grants
the Grace and gently taps... the rhythm.
© Copyright 2007, TK, Patterns of Ink

The moment you were born, the rhythm of breathing in and out began.
Try this with me. Hold your breath for 30 seconds as you read this paragraph. Ready? Start.You are suspending a rhythm of life. If you do this for too long, your brain will begin screaming, “Hey, silly, let your body do what God made it to do. Let it breathe until it’s time not to.” Still holding?....  Now exhale and breathe in again. Ahhh... isn't it amazing?
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Earth’s air outside our bodies has just the right amount of oxygen; our lungs have just the right design to take that oxygen from the air and pass it along to our blood; the heart sends the oxygenated blood coursing through our veins to millions of cells and muscles, including those that power the billows of our lungs that breathe in and out the air. Just as our brain whispered for breath as we read that last paragraph, our body itself cries out for air, "Keep breathing, lungs! Keep beating, heart! Your rhythms of life sustain me!"

This is just a hint of what the Psalmist meant when he said, we are “fearfully and wonderfully made”? It is frightening. It is wonderful.

We cannot bank breaths. It's strictly an "in and out" account. Some day, for all of us, that last breath of life is let go. The opposite of inspire happens… and we expire (we literally ex-spire, breathe out). The “spire” part of both words is the root of the word spirit. The spirit leaves us with that last breath. This may seem too obvious for words, but events of recent days make it feel profound if not surreal. Those events prompted me to share some of these thoughts with our 6-12 students last Friday morning.

Our beating heart and breathing in and out measure time more surely than a clock, for they measure our time.

Is that what is meant by “fearfully…made”—that sometimes we are afraid the rhythm will stop? Maybe. It does happen. Scripture tells us life is a vapor, and its brevity is not something we like to dwell on. For that reason, I prefer to think "fearfully made" means complexity beyond comprehension. I touched on this in a poem called WONDER IS. The truth is we wonder about far more than we know when it comes to the miracle of life.
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One of the comments left in the Mlive article in the December 16 post came from a reader who could not understand why God and not science was getting credit for what many were calling a miracle. I understand that modern man is prone to give science the credit for such events. After all, science figured out the mechanics of how organs like the heart and lungs function, and man did invent the AED machine that provides the electrical impulse needed for resuscitation, but prayer cries out to the One who first put that impulse in the first heart. Prayer reaches beyond how things work and gives credit to the Creator who knows why they work (i.e. the reason for life) to begin with.

In that sense, the "fear" of being wonderfully made is the same fear as in "The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom." [Proverbs 9:10]

Those who reject God or relegate him to some far-off "force" seem to fear the fearful miracle... They fear of the implications of being "wonderfully made." It's not the wonder that frightens them... it's the word made. That word implies a Creator. What if the breath of life is inseparable from the breath of God? If so, believers and agnostics alike face two choices: to believe that breath and the God who made it have purpose. Or to pretend... that LIFE JUST HAPPENED.

If everything we see just happened--a galactic box of BBs spilled--then we owe nothing to anyone. We're accountable to no one. We can live and let live. "Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die." The problem with pretending the intricate design and delicate rhythms of life just happened is that we lose any hope of relationship with God, time and eternity. We begin to think life is all about us and our fleeting existence. As Peggy Lee's hit song in 1969 put it...

"...When that final moment comes

and I'm breathing my last breath,

I'll be saying to myself:

Is that all there is, is that all there is?

If that's all there is, my friends,

then let's keep dancing.
Let's break out the booze

and have a ball... If that's all...there is"

That song depicts the last lines of the poem at the top of this post. It is a "... most ungraceful dance [that] ignores the Hand that grants the Grace and gently taps... the rhythm." As for me and my house [and our school], "[We] will praise Thee for [we are] fearfully and wonderfully made" That same psalmist added in the very last verse of the same Psalm:

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"Let everything that has breath praise the LORD! Praise the LORD!" as heard in this song:

The Carpenter's Christmas Album of 1978:

A Timeless Classic

Here in West Michigan there are at least two radio stations that begin playing Christmas music all day and night—STARTING THE MORNING AFTER HOLLOWEEN! And thousands of people tune in. I know because  my wife is one of them. which means: my three daughters (now married) pretty much do the same.

Don’t get me wrong; I love Christmas music. Hard to imagine a bigger fan, but if pumpkins are still on porches; and trees are still laden with leaves; and the pilgrims have not yet had their moment on stage; it’s hard for me to get fully caught up in Christmas music.

This year was a little different for two reasons: First, we had measurable snow early in November. Put a nice blanket of white on the ground and flock the evergreens I pass on the way to work, and I’m ready to hear Bing Crosby describing the scene. Second, we treated Thanksgiving like Christmas  this year by having the tree in place complete with presents and even a sleigh ride (though by then the snow had melted and we had wheels rather than runners). This early Christmas was due to the fact that our three girls are scheduled to have Christmas with their husband’s family this year so we will be a few states away with Julie’s parents. It’s a cycle that works amazingly well.

So here we are on the first day of December, and I’ve been hearing hours of Christmas music for a month. This would have never happened forty years ago in my life.

When I was a kid, Christmas music was totally out of context until after the Hudson’s Thanksgiving Parade in Detroit. If we were not watching the parade on TV, we were literally down in Detroit watching the parade from the curb. The last float was, of course, a huge sleigh with Santa at the reigns. The mayor of Detroit gave Santa the “Key to the City” in front of Hudson’s [which merged with Dayton's and later gave birth to Target]. Once Santa was in town, it was okay to play Christmas music through New Year’s Day.  Even when I went away to college in 1974, the late November start to Christmas music was my rule of thumb.

Thanksgiving Break began the giddy countdown for the trip home for Christmas Break. The emotions of that three-week gauntlet of classes, concerts, and calendar “X”s on the page seemed perfectly choreographed to a never-ending Yuletide playlist echoing through the halls of the dorms.

It was the Christmas of 1978 that my brother Paul welcomed us home by playing a new Christmas album the morning after my brother Dave and I finished the ten-hour trip up I-75 back to Michigan. The first Carpenter’s Christmas Album is probably the best seasonal album of all time. Rather than a collection of separate tracks, both sides play seamlessly in a blend of sacred and seasonal, solo and choral, holiday hits. It was also the album that showcased Karen's "Merry Christmas, Darling," which quickly became a favorite of college kids all across the country who found themselves very happy to be home with family but painfully lonesome for their sweetheart states away.

To enjoy the full effect of what is called the "non-stop" original album, click below. The first five minutes is an orchestral overture, a touch that lets us know they knew this was no ordinary album.