Waiting for Grace

On the second day of Lent, I found myself in the basement office of the local hospital’s radiology department, waiting to hear my name called. Waiting, like everyone else, for answers. 

I had been optimistic that a 7:30 a.m. appointment would mean a quick in-out visit, but as I watched the minutes tick by on my watch, I wished I had brought something to read. The woman on my right was obviously a pro; she had pulled out a book and tucked in as soon as she sat down. It was Anthony Doerr’s All the Light We Cannot See. 

Across from me were two women on a loveseat, one talking, the other listening and making sympathetic noises. The woman who was talking had chin-length hair of an indeterminate mushroom brown—it wasn’t exactly gray but wasn’t exactly anything else, either. When I entered the waiting room, she had been telling her friend about her plans to sponsor a promising youth for some kind of creative endeavor, but now the subject shifted.

“… She told me she thought I would look great in a purple pixie, not knowing that I had been thinking about the same thing,” she said. The sweet animation of her facial expressions reminded me of someone I knew, but for the moment I couldn’t place who it was. 

Another woman came out of the double doors that led back to procedural suites, and my attention momentarily shifted as I took in her gray-blond hair, worried expression, and the Strawberry Shortcake t-shirt that I knew came from Target’s juniors section. She opened the office door and walked out; in the hallway, I heard a woman’s voice cheerily remark, “Nice t-shirt!” I wondered what news she was carrying home with her.

“… I thought about dyeing it, but it’s so expensive,” the lady on the loveseat was saying. “But maybe some icy lavender or bright teal highlights. So, I thought, if I’m going to be my best, most beautiful self before my hair all falls out—if it does—I’m going to do it. So, she’s giving me a pixie cut tomorrow morning.”

Up until then, I hadn’t been sure which woman on the loveseat had the appointment, but now it was clear, and my heart ached for her. Although I’d never faced the dual scares of cancer and chemotherapy, I knew plenty of women who had. And I thought about how, years earlier, I had sat down in a stylist’s chair, handed her a picture of a girl with a pixie cut, and said, “I’d like it like this, please.” I had been awaiting brain surgery, not chemo, but I hadn’t known whether the doctor would have to shave my head.

If he did, I wanted to be the one who set the terms.

I wondered what this woman would look like in her pixie cut and whether she would opt for the icy lavender or the bright teal highlights—or maybe both. 

Eventually, the double doors swung open again, and a technician called my name. I followed her into a darkened room and sat quietly on the white-sheeted hospital bed as she moved her ultrasound device up and down over the lump behind my right ear. I thought about the women I had seen in the waiting room, wondering who they were, what their stories were, what had brought them in that morning… and what sustained them when they left. There had been no husbands or fathers or boyfriends in attendance—indeed, except for the woman on the loveseat, each of them had waited alone. Or had they?

I’m not sure why, but I had assumed the woman in the Strawberry Shortcake shirt was single. Maybe I was reading too much into her hip jacket, tired face, and nervous air. Maybe the fact that I had also considered buying that t-shirt made me feel like I was seeing a version of myself from ten or fifteen years in the future. Maybe I was still feeling sensitive from the question that the lady at check-in had asked me earlier: “Are you a stay-at-home mom or do you work outside the home?” (“I work from home but I’m not a mom,” I’d replied.) Maybe, like me, the woman in the t-shirt had been drawn to its bright, cheerful design as an antidote to the February doldrums. Or maybe, like my pixie cut before surgery, it was a badge of bravery in the face of the unknown.

For we all face our own unknowns. I would venture to say that “fear of the unknown” is a redundancy; is fear, at its root, caused by anything other than not knowing something? A few months ago, my church home group was discussing this concept, and my best friend said something that completely shifted the way I thought about my own fears and uncertainties. “The reason scenarios like that can seem so paralyzing and impossible,” she said, “is because, when we look ahead at them, we’re doing so without factoring in grace; we can’t imagine the grace of God that will meet us there in the moment.” But it’s true—as if grace were not already enough of a multifaceted mystery, it is something we can neither predict nor pin down, nor bend to our own ends. The presence of grace in the moment, then, transforms the terrors of our unknowns and remakes them into moments woven with a goodness that we never could have imagined. “With man this is impossible, but with God all things are possible.” [1] 

And the statement “with God” is not merely metaphorical.

Dane Ortlund, in his book Gentle and Lowly: The Heart of Christ for Sinners and Sufferers, writes

“… there is, purely speaking, no such ‘thing’ as grace. … [T]he grace of God comes to us no more and no less than Jesus Christ comes to us. In the biblical gospel we are not given a thing; we are given a person.” [2]

The experience of grace is the experience of Emanuel, God-with-us Himself. The experience of grace is the fresh realization of how truly and faithfully we are Companioned.

Later that afternoon, as I waited for my test results, I wondered how long the woman on the loveseat would get to keep her pixie; I prayed that her hair wouldn’t fall out, after all. I finally realized she reminded me of Liz, my dental hygienist, whose smiles and ebullient conversation always made teeth cleanings a little less intimidating. The woman with the book had looked like she could’ve been the twin sister of my longtime neighbor Peggy. “What a perfect metaphor for grace,” I thought, remembering what she had been reading. “All the light we cannot see.” Until Grace Himself opens our eyes to see Him clearly again, reminding us He has been right there with us all along.

[1] Matthew 19:26 (ESV)

[2] Dane Ortlund, Gentle and Lowly: The Heart of Christ for Sinners and Sufferers (Wheaton, Illinois: Crossway, 2020), 69.

The featured image is courtesy of Julie Jablonski and is used with her kind permission for Cultivating.

Amelia Freidline

Amelia M. Freidline lives in the Kansas City suburbs with her parents and a feisty wee terrier named for the tallest mountain in Scotland. She studied journalism, English, and history at the University of Kansas and has worked as a word herder and comma wrangler in food media throughout her professional career. She’s a founding member of The Poetry Pub and has helped edit poetry collections for Bandersnatch Books. She is an amateur poet and writer, a photographer of faeryland, and a wielder of butter, and has self-published several small collections of original writing and photography. Raised on Lewis, Tolkien, Chesterton, Sayers, Conan Doyle and Wodehouse, Amelia hopes to be British if she grows up. She enjoys trees, adventures, marmalade, and great conversations. She loves Jesus because He loved her first.

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