Barrenness

Have spent the last two days pretty much in bed . . . which hasn't happened to me in a couple of years I guess.  Friday morning's rounds, teaching, admission, meetings dragged until mid afternoon and included the second dead baby of the week in my long line of waiting consults (newborn, held wrapped by grandmother, nurse screening the crowd of outpatients finally peels back the blanket and notes the grey-green tone of the skin and calls me, I come over and find no heart rate or respiratory effort for who knows how long, shake my head and begin to say I'm sorry as both women begin to wail) . . . the intensity of the ward combined with the lingering effects of this virus pretty much wiped me out.  I've forgotten what it feels like to be so so tired, to be convulsed out of sleep by coughing every few minutes, to arouse for ibuprofen and then lie back down exhausted.  To feel guilty about everything Scott has to do.

Today I'm marginally more alert, and reading at least.  I was struck by Carolyn Curtis James' exposition of barrenness in the book of Ruth.  Since it is a prominent theme in the Bible, she concludes that the role of the barren woman is to remind us that all life, all goodness, all power, comes from God.  That we are all barren spiritually (and to some extent physically as well).  That all our good efforts will be futile without resurrection power.  God chooses the hopeless situation in which to move and act.  

And this is good news, for me at least.  Lying and coughing, I'm completely impotent to do even the most basic activities of family survival, let alone serve anyone else.  And lying and coughing, my perspective on our life looks bleak, I can see more of the struggle than of the victory, and sense inadequacy and failing to a deeper extent, I find myself grieving losses and mourning the present problems.  In that mindset it is good to hear the words of Isaiah (54):

Sing, O barren,

You who have not borne!

Break forth into singing, and cry aloud,

You who have not labored with child!

For more are the children of the desolate

Than the children of the married woman:  says the LORD.

Resurrection will come.