Apparently, I stopped believing in miracles. I'm not sure when it happened, or actually even why.
Growing up, I never believed in Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny, and due to a mishap involving my first lost tooth and a furnace vent, the Tooth Fairy and I didn't coexist in my reality for long, either. Yet I always, since before I can remember, believed in miracles.
Until this past week, when I realized that I don't believe any longer.
Maybe it came from years of seemingly-unanswered prayer for miraculous healing from Crohn's disease.
Perhaps it's from years of working around sick and often dying children, watching time and time again as a child slips away from the arms of a pleading, bargaining, begging mother.
Maybe it comes from an unwarranted sense of control paired with perceived understanding of the world around me. The world was mysterious when I was a child, so miracles were welcome wonders. Now, there doesn't seem to be space for them in this world I so intelligently understand.
I have stopped hoping as the parents around me hope. I have stopped praying as they do on their knees, on their feet, surely even as they lay in bed before tossing and turning for brief moments of sleep as their world crumbles down around them.
What's worse, I have grown irritated by the irrational, unrealistic, recklessly optimistic attitudes around me, often muttering in the privacy of my own head, "Are we looking at the same child, are we seeing the same thing? How can you possibly have hope? How can you possibly imagine a positive outcome?"
I have become the Grinch who stole miracles, packing my bag full of the last ounces of joy and hope, certain that no positive will come. Wishing for it, hoping for it, clinging to it is a waste of time and energy. My heart is two sizes too small. I am worse than a three-decker sauerkraut and toadstool sandwich with arsenic sauce.
I recently cared for a patient near the end of his life. Medically speaking, his situation was hopeless, which as a nurse makes me feel hopeless, helpless, defeated, and failed. My usually-sunny disposition melts away under my sarcasm and snark.
Because I no longer believe in miracles.
His mother came in to see him. I had prepared myself to support her, imagining she would crumble into a pile of tears, falling apart being the only possible manifestation of the hopeless emotions I was feeling amplified by her mother's love.
Our God is faithful, she said, with a smile on her face, the sunshine of hope in her eyes.
Cancer is faithful, I snipped back in my mind.
We still believe He can heal him, she continued, as if she had heard what I was thinking.
I believe that if I went home and the doctors went home, cancer would win lady, right here, right now. It is over; we lost this one.
For a brief moment, my frustration turned to guilt for my lack of faith, then to jealousy for her overflowing devotion to a God I sometimes long to hear, likely due to my recent failure to ask for Him to speak.
I pulled myself back to the reality of where I stood with her. I provided updates, what we were doing for him, what his body was doing in return. In a laundry list of updates, perhaps two things were positive. She thanked me for the information, repeating back the minor positive notes I had given.
Again I began to feel my irritation welling up. Do you really not understand the gravity of this illness? I wanted to ask.
And then, yet again, as if she had heard me, she replied with this. Shrinking me back to size, putting me back in my place: A positive attitude gives us power over our circumstances, rather than allowing our circumstances to have power over us.
I was stunned. Here I was, judging her positive attitude as a fault or a flaw. Completely disregarding the choice that it was. Similar to the choice she was making to believe God for a miracle. It wasn't blind faith. It wasn't negligent belief. It was strength and devotion. The choice to believe in something more powerful than me, more healing than the doctors on our team.
When I came out of the room, tears welling in my eyes, I sat at my computer and looked down at a small plate of candies she must have left for me on her way into the room. A hand written note was laid above them:
Kate, your devotion is so appreciated, S.
S, it is your devotion that I am appreciating today. And because of you, mother of my patient, I am beginning again to believe in miracles. Because in the depth of despair over losing your beloved son you took me into your arms and guided me back onto a track where love is real, positive thinking is a choice that saves us, and miracles do happen.
So today, I too am praying for a miracle for your son. And as I pray, with a positive attitude and a humbled heart, I am referring to Psalm 30, my personal favorite, and one I know we both can love.