Eric Youngblood: Can’t Anything Work Right?

  • Tuesday, August 23, 2016
  • Eric Youngblood

A crumpled lady lay small and scared in a hospital bed.

Uninsured. 

And unsure. Unsure if she mattered. Unsure what would happen. Unsure how to proceed. 

Sure only of pain. Loud, screaming, lonely stabs of pain.

Her mangled nerves and troubled mind refused to move in concert with her dilapidated body.

“Nothing works right.” That’s all that could be honestly said, of each nook and cranny of her life. “Nothing works right.” 

Can’t Anything Work Right?
I arrive at that conclusion with some regularity too, even though my ailments are not hers.

Nothing works right. Or perhaps more desperately as a protest, “Can’t anything work right?”

Well, sometimes, not always, but sometimes, things do work right. And when they do, the hope of “all things sad coming untrue” begins to re-emerge from its hiding. And you smile in relief. You beam with quiet joy. You might even jump with giddiness.

I saw another woman, around this same time, on the verge of giddy jumping. She was in the community group I’m privileged to lead. She was gathered with a cadre of those who’d learned to fuss over each other quite well in tender ways. We were in a pole barn. In Hinkle. A raging fire warmed the air. But her words caused the hottest atmospheric spark.

Because the woman, Ann, had news to report. Hopping news. News that wouldn’t be suppressed. That couldn’t be suppressed. She had news that every now and again, something works right. Better than right. Or rather, she had assurance that Someone works right, and He often does so through folks who are unsure on behalf of folks who are unsure and who think that nothing ever works right.

Ann knew the frail woman in the hospital. Ann ached for the crumpled woman, shook with compassion for the forgotten woman’s pain, trembled with the disorientation of the sick woman’s plight. And it wasn’t as if Ann didn’t have her own troubles or scores else to do either!

And Ann wasn’t alone. Come to find out, over the preceding three months of languishing, uninsured, unsure sorrow, several folks in myriad ways put on a live rendition of the Apostle Paul’s text in 1 Corinthians 12. They proved that if one part of Jesus’ body finds itself lambasted--“bruised and broken by the fall”- that the rest of the body smarts with the demolition of it too. If one part finds itself helpless and alone, the other part has to run smack dab into the chaos of that helpless aloneness.  

So for months, Ann had been an integrated component in a pick-up team of care. So had Sharon. And Sandy. And Terri. And Lori. And Charissa. And Don. And Allen. And Thomas. And even me with the tiniest bit role.  But the team had been led by my friend and colleague, Pastor Hutch; led passionately, ably, persistently, courageously, and prayerfully. 

And then add in pray-ers, which is a real job, like Susan, Lyn, Michael, Beth, Margie, Judy, Charlie, Cathy and a pro-bono lawyer’s zealous advocacy, and a social worker who means it, but whose names Jesus and Hutch know, but I don’t, and a host of dedicated nurses at Erlanger. And Charlie. And Kelly. And Connor. And Jay. And on and on, literally, it likely goes.
 
Won’t You Do Something to Show that Sometimes Things Work Right?
A couple of weeks before Ann’s good news of reversal and homecoming, during a polite discussion about the love of God, she interrupted us. Her inner trouble disrupted us. Her advocacy erupted from within her. Her own helplessness got the best of her. Her frustration overtook her. And we stopped what we were doing, because she was wise and called us to prayer. 

To prayer that moves, if not a mountain, at least a bureaucratic process with Medicare. To prayer that generates rescue, rehabilitation, and a swirl of purposeful activity. She called us to demanding prayer to the Shepherd of the harassed. And we harassed him with the crumpled lady’s distress.

We nagged, prodded, and pleaded. We reminded Him, sought to cajole Him and urged Him. We trusted Him and admitted how hard that was. We brought a woman trapped in a vortex of nothing working right, right up close to Him. And said, “Won’t you do something to show that sometimes things work right?”

And He said, “Yes.”

He said a loud, “Yes!”

And now several weeks later, the cause of Ann’s new giddiness, the crumpled woman was being brought home. Liberated from hospital captivity. She came home finally insured, emancipated from bureaucratic limbo, and no longer unsure if she mattered. Because some of our all-star mercy givers with feet on their prayers, convinced her with their time, their hearts, their wrestlings on her behalf, and their million little acts of self-forgetful service.

And a nurse at the hospital said, “What church is that?” We’ve never, in the hospital business, seen a patient get that much care from that many people who are not her family.”

But she didn’t realize, we are a family. Much like your church is. 

See, I’m willing to bet this story isn’t all that unique. It’s just heartening. And what happens all the time in varying versions in communities breathed into existence by Christ and animated by Him. 

It’s why Lesslie Newbigen once suggested:

“I have come to feel that the primary reality of which we have to take account in seeking for a Christian impact on public life is the Christian congregation. How is it possible that the gospel should be credible, that people should come to believe that the power which has the last word in human affairs is represented by a man hanging on a cross?

I am suggesting that the only answer, the only hermeneutic of the gospel, is a congregation of men and women who believe it and live by it. I am, of course, not denying the importance of the many activities by which we seek to challenge public life with the gospel– evangelistic campaigns, distribution of Bibles and Christian literature, conferences, and even books such as this one.
But I am saying that these are all secondary, and that they have power to accomplish their purpose only as they are rooted in and lead back to a believing community.”

And it is why a Lutheran Bishop once responded so cleverly to a hypothetical quandary that could, of course, at any moment, become stunningly real.

He was asked, “What's the best advice a pastoral or other counselor might give to a woman in her prime who faces devastating health problems?”

The Lutheran Bishop replied without pause, “She should have been an active member of a vital congregation for the previous twenty years.” 

Of course, that’s not truly a pastoral answer. 

But it’s certainly a robust pastoral theology. It gets at the heart of the myriad deposits of trust we deposit over years and similarly have invested in us when we are privileged to be anchored in a one-anothering community of faith that means it and embodies the self-giving care we ourselves have received from our suffering but resurrected Savior.

We’ve been engrafted into the family of Him who sets the lonely in families, who is a Dad to duds, and a Mom to misfits, and a Craftsman who refurbishes so much that is not working right, so that sometimes, an earnest woman entrusted with many sorrows of her own, can care more about the sorrows of another than about her own, and can report that the Father does plenty. For the uninsured. For the unsure. For those for whom nothing ever works right. 

And to that, I say, as an onlooker, Amen. And glory. And Hallelujah. 




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Eric Youngblood is the senior pastor at Rock Creek Fellowship (PCA) on Lookout Mountain. Please feel free to contact him at eric@rockcreekfellowship.org or follow him on Twitter @GEricYoungblood.


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