Quilt squares

It is hard to know if the experiences in your life are regular ones or perhaps irregular ones.  It is easy and perhaps erroneous to assume we all travel the same path, learn the same lessons and see the same things.  Working in the public sector for over 25 years, I am very aware that while people, in general, share similar hopes, dreams, and desires, the way to achieve these things is as varied as the patterns on a patchwork quilt. God weaves the design in our lives in expert fashion, bringing as many squares, or people, into our quilt as he can, thus enhancing,  strengthening and binding our quilts in his loving hands. The resulting quilt is colorful and vibrant.

I work with some of the world's most trusted individuals.  In public polls, nurses always seem to be at the top of the list for one of the world's most trusted professions. Over the years, occasionally a person will ask why or how I have continued to work considering the needs of my family are so great. I tell them it is because my work brings me stability,  solace and wonderful perspective as I rub shoulders and work with the "cream of the crop" in society. 

One nurse in my current job has been extra empathetic.  Perhaps having a son with a neurological disorder too, her path, or quilt, has been woven in a manner similar to my own. There was a time a few years ago when I left the neurologist's office and was told my teenage daughter might be headed for a vegetative state if we did not find medicine to work for her. As it was, she was already spending the majority of the day in a catatonic state, rocking back and forth, not responding to her surroundings.  They thought perhaps she had an unusual form of juvenile dementia. These words were like a knife to my heart. I had already lived through years of autism with my oldest daughter when she seemed to be on a whole different planet.  Although my older daughter had largely recovered, there was another daughter in a precarious situation, fighting a battle in her mind again. If she lost her life would be in shambles.  Most people acted uncomfortable when I told them the horrific news about Sydney.  They changed the topic or said surely they would find something to help her. All these suggestions were well-meaning, but the answer I needed and still remember to this day was the one given me at the nurse's station when I told this lovely woman my predicament. She grabbed both my hands, looked me in the eyes, said, "Oh no!" and started crying with me. She just cried.No one else had thought to do this, but perhaps it took another mother who knew what it was like to have a child suffering and hurting to respond in this manner.

In John 11, there is an account of Jesus before he rose his friend Lazarus from the dead. Even though he knew Lazarus would be fine, even though he knew the end from the beginning,  when he saw his friends crying over Lazarus,  he cried too. He shared in their grief because that is what they needed at that moment. They needed their grief acknowledged, they needed their grief to be shared. How often do we try to dry the tears that are being shed when the person would feel so much better if we actually cried with them?
Over the years, Sydney has improved and is anything but a vegetable. However, I have never forgotten the feeling of another human taking my hands in theirs, looking into my eyes and then crying with me. It was a hard, coarse quilt square to be sewn into my quilt that day, and it probably could not have found it's proper place in my life's quilt, without the help of a friend joining me in my sorrow.