Triage at Two in the Morning

She is very good at this, and being very good at it is exactly the shape of the problem.

Nine years on overnights. She can hear a person come through the doors and have three quarters of the picture before they reach the desk, from the walk, the color, the way they are holding one arm against the body. She knows which complaints are what they say they are and which ones are a door being knocked on for a different reason. She is fast and she is accurate and on a bad night that accuracy is the difference between a good outcome and the other kind.

What she cannot do, and has not noticed she cannot do, is tell you much of anything about the people the complaints arrive in.

It is not that she is unkind. She says, come on back, sweetheart, and she means it, in the way you mean a thing that has worn smooth. But somewhere in nine years the people stopped arriving as people and started arriving as presentations. Chest, wrist, fever, chart, next. Faces come across that desk the way pictures come, quick, sorted, filed, gone, and her hands do the cuff and her eyes do a thing they have been doing a long time without ever asking her permission.

Then a woman comes in at two and answers the wrong question.

She asks what brought you in tonight, which is a form question with a form answer, and the woman says: my sister died in February and I have not slept since the funeral and tonight my chest went tight and I got frightened and I did not have anybody to call so I drove here.

And then she stops. And she sits with her purse on her lap and she does not look away, and she waits, and what she is waiting for has nothing to do with a blood pressure cuff. She is waiting to find out whether anyone in this building is going to look up.

So the nurse looks up. The whole face. Fifty-something, mascara gone, chin doing that small hard work a chin does. And it costs her something. She does not know why it costs her something. She hears herself say, February, that is not long ago at all, and the woman's mouth comes apart and she says, no, it isn't, and something in the room changes that no chart will ever record.

And the nurse sits at her station afterward with the form half filled in, having looked at one whole human being for the first time in longer than she can measure, and having found it hard.

And you know that desk. Somewhere along the way you stopped seeing people and started seeing images of them, and nobody handed you a form to sign the day it happened. Faces began arriving sorted. And this week somebody answered you with more than the question asked for and then sat there waiting, and it cost you, and you did not expect it to.

Now settle this before we go another line, because I suspect you have braced for the opposite. You are not a cold woman and nine years of nights did not make you one. Genesis 1:31 says God looked at everything He had made and called it very good, and your eyes were inside that verdict; what has happened since is a wound laid over a gift and not a judgment on the one carrying it, and the Holy Spirit is at this desk with you at two in the morning and is not embarrassed to be here.

The servant who woke up to an army

Come to Dothan before daylight, where a young man goes out early and finds the whole town ringed with horses and chariots, and comes back inside saying the thing anybody would say: what are we going to do.

Now watch the prophet. He does not argue. He does not explain the political situation. He does not tell the young man to calm down, which is the least useful sentence in any language. He says, they that be with us are more than they that be with them, and then he prays one sentence, and it is not the sentence you would expect.

And Elisha prayed, and said, LORD, I pray thee, open his eyes, that he may see. And the LORD opened the eyes of the young man; and he saw: and, behold, the mountain was full of horses and chariots of fire round about Elisha.2 Kings 6:17

He did not pray for reinforcements. He prayed for eyes. Nothing on that hillside changed. The horses of fire were already there and had been there the whole time, and the only thing that moved in the whole account was what a frightened young man was able to see.

You have a hillside already full, and you were never the one who had to fill it. The written word says the Lord opened his eyes, which puts the whole verb on God's side of the sentence and leaves the young man doing nothing but standing there; and the Holy Spirit is the one praying that same prayer through a nurse at a triage desk at two in the morning.

And notice what Elisha did not say. He did not tell the young man he should have seen it already. He did not treat frightened eyes as a character flaw. He asked God to open them, and God opened them, and that was the end of the matter.

Why a whole person is heavier than a complaint

I want to be honest about why the woman was hard to look at, because if I pretend it should have been easy you will read your own difficulty as failure, and it is not.

A complaint can be handled. A complaint has a pathway, a protocol, a place to put it, and when you have put it there you are done and you are still standing. A person is not a pathway. That woman put her sister and February and the drive over on the desk in one sentence, and there is nowhere in the building to file that, and being handed something with no place to put it is a real weight. Your eyes have been trained for nine years to hold what can be handled. Of course it cost. That is not the wound. That is the sight coming back, and it always costs at the desk.

You were given eyes that hold a whole person, and you had them long before this job trained them narrow. Psalm 94:9 asks whether the One who formed the eye cannot see, and the question only lands because the forming was deliberate and personal; His Spirit is doing the reopening at His own pace, and He is neither hurrying you nor keeping a count of the nights.

There is a second thing under the cost and it needs saying plainly, especially to somebody who works nights. Narrow eyes are not only how you get through a shift. They are how you get out of the building at seven in the morning with anything left. If you looked at every face fully you would not last a year, and you know that, and so the narrowing was not laziness. It was survival, and it worked, and it has cost more than it was supposed to.

You are not being asked to take that protection off by force, and there is no stopwatch anywhere near this. Ezekiel 36:26 promised a heart of flesh where the stone had been, and it comes as something done to a person rather than wrung out of one; the same Spirit who does that work is the One who sent a woman with a purse on her lap at two in the morning.

And if what you carry out of that building at seven is heavier than a page can hold, do not carry it alone. Find a real person this week, somebody who can sit with you without needing to fix a thing, and let them be one face you can look at.

Nothing on the hill had to change

Here is the part of Dothan that will not leave me alone. The horses were already there. The fire was already on the mountain. The young man's terror was not caused by an absence, it was caused by eyes that could only take in one army.

And that is your desk. The people were always people. The woman was always somebody's sister. Nothing in that waiting room has to be added for it to be full of faces; only your eyes have to open, and that is precisely the prayer that got answered fastest in the whole account.

You are surrounded, right now, as you read this, and the surrounding is not the thing you have been afraid of. Scripture says the mountain was full, and it says it in the past tense of a thing that was already true before anybody looked; the Holy Spirit is the one opening eyes on a hillside, in a hallway, at a station at two in the morning.

So the waiting room is not a line of presentations. It is the woman who has not slept since February, and the man in the corner who came in for his hand and has been sitting on something else for an hour. Names, all of them, under the charts. And your eyes are His, and He is handing them back one face at a time.