“I want Evelyn!” a wizened, wheelchair-trapped man shouted.
I had come to visit one of my parishioners at the nursing home.
“I want Evelyn!” the old man with a two-day-old beard moaned. His left hand and foot were immobile, twisted unnaturally on his lap. With his right foot, he was pushing his wheelchair in ever-larger circles.
Now he was weeping. “Please give me Evelyn. Won’t someone give me Evelyn?”
Come on, I thought, as the busy, expressionless nurses filled out their paperwork, why don’t you get Evelyn?
Later I discovered that Evelyn, the old man’s wife, had died fifteen years ago.
Welcome to the Allegheny County Nursing Home.
I had come to see Betty, a member of my church for over fifty years. After she broke her hip, her absent family-suddenly present-placed her in a ten-by-fourteen room with faded plastic flowers and an indelible stench of urine. She would spend the rest of her life helping the old man look for Evelyn-and staring out her window at a playground whose nimble children she would never meet.
Betty’s predicament, the old man’s woeful cry, and the indifferent nurses completely unnerved me.
Lord, I thought, is this some kind of existential hell, a dwelling right out of Sartre’s No Exit?
I found Betty sitting next to her roommate, a stroke victim mute and immobile. Betty, in her wheelchair, was whispering, “Sh-h-h-hh” as her friend wept.
“It’s okay, honey,” Betty whispered.
Unable to summon a nurse in time, the old lady was soiled with her own feces. Betty stroked her hair.
I stood at the door and watched, suffering my own emotional stroke.
To assuage the old woman’s humiliation, Betty sacramentally offered her a one-inch chocolate Easter bunny. Knowing her friend could not swallow the rabbit’s ample ears, Betty bit them off and lovingly placed the bunny in her friend’s mouth.
Unblinking eyes said, “Thank you.”
Betty was a miracle. She was not trapped. She was not defeated. She did not need my pity. As surely as God’s power brought down the walls of Jericho, God’s power was at work in Betty.
After pastoring eight years in one of the seediest parts of Pittsburgh, I will take any miracle I can get. Like the time God healed Mary’s head during morning worship; her cancerous growth just disappeared.
Mary’s miracle was the way I had expected things should happen. When I was 25 and in seminary, miracles came freely. I could not imagine a problem that good sense, hard work, and prayer could not solve.
In Pittsburgh, though, miracles don’t bloom so readily. Returning an abused child to his angry parents, or gasping for breath outside 82-year-old Emma’s door, whom I had just told must spend the rest of her life in a tiny nursing-home room, I have a learned that miracles can take time.
Like Jacob I wrestle with God through the night. Only when I lose do I win. When I wait on God and give up control, miracles occur. And I walk with a limp for the rest of my life.
Quick solution, it seems to me, is an oxymoron. In spite of my ample faith, I wonder if Scott will ever overcome his alcoholism. For seven years we have worked with him. We have prayed for him. We have fed him and at times boarded him in our Isaiah 58 House (a ministry to the homeless). Yet he appears no closer to the straight and narrow. The miracle here, perhaps, is that he is still alive.
Tony is an embryonic miracle, I hope. At the corner of Friendship and Roup streets, his left Reebok kicks the snow into the gutter. His right shoe is an air-cushioned Nike. Despite owning only one air-cushioned shoe-the other one was stolen at the local cooperative shelter last July-Tony is very proud of his Nike.
It is a wistful memory of a capitalistic life he abandoned almost ten years ago. Losing his Westinghouse electrical engineering job to an ambitious Harvard MBA, Tony proudly declined less prestigious and financially rewarding demotions and resigned from his job. The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania agreed that he had been laid off, though, and granted him unemployment. So for the next fifty-two weeks, with vengeful enthusiasm and his gold-plated Cross pen, he signed his unemployment checks.
It even surprises Tony-who until recently has firmly controlled his environment-how quickly things crumble. As if designing a new electrical circuit for a Westinghouse electric range, he deftly, systematically moves from unemployment to welfare to Gallo Wild Rose. Effortlessly, Tony erases all vestiges of middle class America-his sixty-hour-a-week job, a four bedroom Cape Cod, season tickets to the Steelers, his late model, rustproofed Cutlass, and, finally, his family.
Ellen, Tony’s wife, was only mildly concerned when Tony lost his job. After all, he had been hunting for a while anyway-this would only hasten the process. Besides, even a cursory reading of the help wanted ads in the Sunday Pittsburgh Press, where electrical engineering jobs proliferate, sustained her boundless faith in her educated, if somewhat eccentric, husband.
The unemployment checks didn’t bother her either. To show her solidarity with Tony’s sacrifice, she stopped purchasing Perrier-but with a wry smile. She did start worrying when he started standing in welfare lines.
But Ellen is made of stern stuff. Even when Tony started drinking, she faithfully stood by her husband. She even dusted off her old diploma and started substitute teaching. The welfare checks and Wild Rose were bearable-his wild eyes are not.
She had to escape that awful look. Somewhere, sometime, he has given up. Even before the rotgut dulled his eyes, Tony had capitulated to some unseen enemy lurking in the mist. He is a lost soul, and Ellen cannot, will not, go with him there. Not there. Not to the place of lostness, of homelessness.
Many times Ellen had seen Tony peer into the surrealistic late-night hue of his Macintosh. Tony epitomized confidence. Ellen felt safe in the arms of this twentieth-century centurion with his B.S. from Georgia Tech. She felt invulnerable.
But that myth can no longer be maintained, so Ellen retreats. And Tony walks away for good.
Tony never really lives anywhere. Like a prehistoric nomad he wanders from shelter to soup kitchen to public library (or bridge-depending on the weather) to drop-in center and back to shelter. Each destination is a mile or so from the other. On the weekend after the shelter closes, no bathroom is available to street people in his neighborhood, except a nearby church. So Tony, with common street bladder problems, frequents my church (carefully avoiding all worship services). Earthy needs keep bringing him our way. Can there be providence even in this?
Barry has attended our church for years. Twelve years ago he was a dysfunctional, autistic young man. One of my elders spent ten years teaching him how to play the piano. Today he holds a job and is functionally normal. It is a miracle.
Terry started to attend our church five years ago. He was just one more black child who needed ever so much attention. But Terry is different. He brought his mom and dad. They are now deacons in our church. It is a miracle.
The more I look, I see that miracles are everywhere. In the song of an eccentric bag lady. In the life of a shut-in who, in spite of severe arthritis, has managed to serve me lunch.
God is a miracle worker, even amid life’s mess.
-James P. Stobaugh
First Presbyterian Church
Johnstown, Pennsylvania
Copyright © 1991 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal. Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.
