Takin’ a Hit For a Friend… Gladly

Just when you thought a story was over….

If you haven’t read the post previous to this one you may not understand what you are about to read, so I suggest that you drop down to read it, if you need help getting there just click here. 

After we got back from the eye doctor on Friday I was just a bit grumpy on why I had to do all that rig-a-ma-role, I was slightly irritated for the lost time. 

I needed to have gotten a tarp for the pasture turkeys and there is a good book waiting for me at the library.  The appointment did go rather quickly, “no waiting on checkout 4 with eyeball collapse”,  but the drive into big town and back takes up a whoppin’ chunk of time. 

And of course, even though I know he was kidding because he also heard what Dr. Kim said about the whole thing and the possibility of retina detachment, in fact he was standing at the eye poster when she came back in the room and he said he couldn’t see the vitreous on the picture and how was it going to pull the retina and exactly where is the retina (he hadn’t liked my explanation after I read the paper to him out loud for entertainment purposes), so he got a full blown explanation and dramatization from Dr. Kim, and yet he still came home and told Bet that, “yep, we had another one of your mother’s hypochondriac trips into the doctor, I felt stupid for going in.  I of course got immediately defensive and Bet laughed and said that once again I bit, Dad was trying to get you all stirred up and sure enough he succeeded.  Mom, you gotta stay tough she says.  I thought I was being tough when I told him what for.  No, mom, stay tough and ignore him.  Bet, is that you or your grandfather ERB?

So I was a bit irritated about the seemingly wasted afternoon, a half-hour on the phone, a forty-five minute drive into town, a thirty minute appointment from the time of walking in to walking out (if only they could all go so fast) and forty-five minutes back home. Two hours and thirty minutes that I could have wasted watching a trashy movie, and still have time to spare!   And yet, I still have to pay attention to what I see, just in case, so I can go in and do it all again.  So then there is also that tension.  Arg why? Why the wasted time, why the tension?  I didn’t dwell on it, “whatever” my mind kept saying, I had to do what I had to do, onward life.

But once in a while we do get to know why.  And this time I take the why very humbly, very very humbly, because of my momentary whining in light of the post (I Would Rather) I made just the other day, about doing what needs to be done, what God calls you to do, no matter how silly it looks to others (hypochondriac trip to town) or yourself actually.

Just prior to making the first call to the eye doctor I had been over at my friend’s across the highway, she had mentioned a few days ago that she had my lidded 2quart measuring bowl.  So on my way into our little towns to stop at the post office, run by the library for a hold, and swing into the funky all-you’ll-ever-need-short-of-food store for a tarp for the pasture turkeys, I stopped at her house.  And of course, in spite of the fact that I was interrupting her lunch with her husband and children (he has Fridays off) we got to talking.  She loaned me a book, the book I started reading on the way to the doc, we talked about all the tractor work she can see me do out by the highway, and then we talked about eyeball weirdness.

I told her that I meant to call the doctor today but didn’t get to it, Dirt had encouraged me to call for appointments for stuff now before the new year.  And I probably should, blah blah blah.  Then she told me she was having similar issues, except that where I just went blurry a couple of times she actually lost sight for a few hours only to wake up normal.  My parting words to her as we left to go further down the road to town…”we should go to the doctor.”  We are both reluctant to go, me more so than her usually.

She has a very long driveway and along that long driveway I was getting firmly nudged.  Firmly.  Which is weird because even though I said that thing about going to the doc, all that the talking to her really cemented in my head was, yep, we’re getting’ old and body parts are fallin’ apart. I didn’t really want to go to the doctor any more than when I pulled into her driveway. 

But at the end of her driveway as I waited for traffic to clear, I told Bet I was going to swing back into our driveway and make some calls: I should really call the post office, it is out of our way actually and it had short hours I should make sure they’re open; I should call for those doctor appointments, I know that if you call on Friday you’re more likely to get in the following week than if you wait to call on Monday; I should grab my cell phone and there was something else….

The rightness of going backward to go forward was proved out on my first call to the post office.  Even though I saw on the website when I went to get the phone number that they were open for the afternoon, since I had the phone in my hand, I still called.  I was told that there was nothing the Postmaster could do about my undelivered Netflix.  Okay, we just saved over twenty minutes and the gas money to swing into Roy before swinging down to Yelm.

The next phone call I decided to make was to call the eye doctor instead of the GP for a physical, because while waiting for the PM to answer I saw the new website about the light flashing and that it called for an immediate call to your eye doctor.

You know what happened with my afternoon after that call Dear Reader, now let me tell you why I was strongly nudged to go back home in the first place.

When I was looking up more stuff about the eye symptoms on the web while waiting to be connected on my phone calls, I was seeing more and more that all the eyeball weirdness my friend and I were having was nothing to monkey around with.   So when the call to the doctor and their insistence on getting me in right away proved out what I was reading, I called my friend and told her to go to her eye doc, now!  No chit chat, just call!

Saturday, after the flurry and after I wrote my post, thinking that my rig-a-ma-role afternoon was so that if someone else who’s retina was actually going to detach needed to know what I previously didn’t, I should write and tell them all about my new found knowledge, my phone rang.

It was Terry, asking if I was blind yet.  Very funny, no, no big deal my friend, yet another false alarm.

Well hers wasn’t.  She did go into her eye doctor that very same day.  Her eye ball wasn’t collapsing it was about to explode!  She has glaucoma.

Wow.  She might not have ever gone in, her glaucoma was not causing discomfort and only occasional vision issues, not enough to bother her.  She could have really been done in and ended up with permanent vision loss if not for my insistence to go because of my eye stuff which ended up no big deal except for a lost afternoon. 

I’ll take that irritation gladly.  I’ll be less reluctant to listen to those nudges that seemingly are of no big deal, certainly not a God thing, right?

She is stable for the moment, well her eyes are stable for the moment, but while I am pretty much in the clear (unless I see more flashes as my eyeball finishes collapsing away from the retina or when the other one starts and have to go in again), she definitely has to go in for further testing.  And the testing will tell them what they have to do.  She has a condition that must be watched carefully from here on out and by the grace that is our God’s, she won’t have lost her sight.

Obviously I need to continually be reminded that God things are not always huge in the eyes of the world, they may only be important to one person.  One person and her family perhaps.  A God thing doesn’t necessarily mean it works out to a world changing event.  In spite of the seeming insignificance of the matter, like turning back home and making a few phone calls that appear to only delay my day, those God nudges are not to be ignored.  They are big deals.  They are God deals.  And to God there is nothing that is insignificant, He carries the sparrow and knows the count of our hairs, every last one of them.

God call us to particular moments and for a particular life He sets before an individual.  Both need to be listened to.  Both are paramount.  You ought to do the individual things God leads you to and you ought to live the life He places before you not your brother.

If I was swept up by the need to be significant, do a God thing big time, answer other peoples’ God calls to go far a field, Paulinian like, and not be home, tilling just a little bit of the earth and planting just a few vegetables for just a few people and living an ordinary mundane life, then I wonder where my friend’s sight would be today, tomorrow, next year?

I have to constantly remind myself that I have to answer God’s call.  I have to answer the call God gives to me.  I have to avoid the human desire to be significant to a great many people.  I have to be content in being significant to God alone and let him chose to whom else I am significant.

It is not up to me to decide who I impact, or how many thousands I bring to God or who’s minds I change.  It is my job to follow God’s lead.  To do the things he lays before me and to do them well and be delighted to do them, not wondering or wishing to do worldwide significant things.

Oh how I would love to do both, be vital to my immediate neighbor and also bring thousands and thousands to God and save millions of marriages and keep zillions of children pure and without needless baggage.  But perhaps I need to remember how many gums and walks God knows that I can do at the same time.