What are the stories we tell about our own lives? I have just been through a 4 day run of going
to various different story telling events from hearing several Native American
story telling styles to just a story jam where people told their stories. I was asked why I as a therapist who spends
many, many hours of the week listening to people why I would during free time
listen to more stories of people? The
answer is that I am interested in how we tell our own stories…the meaning we
put on events and whether or how we notice the presence of the spirit in our
lives. I am also fascinated by the ways
in which our lives are interconnected, woven into a web even when we don’t
know it.
This weekend I heard three stories that were told in very
different settings by people who did not know each other that speak to the
amazing way the Divine connects us to each other for the purpose of healing. The first story was simply one of how a
woman was reached out to over the internet by someone who had been the
Goddaughter of her Father. This was significant
to her since she never knew her father who left her mother right after she was born. The woman told her she had some family
pictures and mailed to her photos of her parent’s engagement and
honeymoon. It was surprising and yet
healing to look at these pictures and discover that her parents had clearly
been in love. (A thought that had not
occurred to her since she had only known her divorced and embittered mother.)
The next story came from a doctor told about a time when he
was in residency and during his rotation in the emergency room. He woke up on a Monday morning at 2am from a
nightmare in which a young woman had come in having an asthma attack and
despite everything they did to try to help her she had died unable to breath. He was so upset by this dream that he went
to the Pulmonologist asking to be instructed on all emergency steps he could
take if someone in ER could not breathe. He told the Sr Doctor that he felt
certain he would be faced with this situation.
The doctor felt busy and did not see the point of this and put him off
till “tomorrow”. He put him off every
day for 3 days. Finally on the 4th
day the Resident insisted the doctor make the time to tell him stating that we
have used up all the waiting time. As
he began explaining the doctor did sort of get into it and the Resident was
able to make a careful step by step list of options to try which ended with “and
if none of that works you will have to call me, we will have to operate immediately
and put her on an artificial lung”.
Within the next 16 hours a young 21 year old woman was
brought into ER by her parents, unable to breathe. The young resident followed carefully the
step by step instructions that he had and nothing worked. She was down to only 4% oxygenation
level. People die at 3%. He called the Pulmonologist who indeed had
to operate quickly and put her on an artificial lung. Only because the resident had known exactly
what to do and had tried everything quickly was there enough time to get the
Pulmonologist in there and they saved her life. Her parents were extremely grateful and then
said: “It is the strangest thing our daughter actually had a dream Monday night where
she dreamt that she had an asthma attack so severe that she could not breath
at all.” The resident asked what time
she has this dream and was told at 2am in the morning.
It strikes me that only God can make an intervention like
this. Both parties, who did not
know each other, were armed with the knowledge to save the young womans’
life. What an act of faith
it was for this non-religious resident doctor to believe his own dream. It strikes me that our very lives may depend upon
the faithfulness of strangers.
In a remarkably similar vein another story I heard this
weekend was from a Native American man in his 50’s. He told that in his twenties he was so
ruined and desolate from his experience in the Residential Schools that he
wandered for a decade drunk and homeless till a powerful native healer had come
to him. She had gone on a vision quest
and when emerging from a sweatlodge an image of a small 5 year old boy who had
grown up with straight water on one side and curved water on the other side (an
accurate description of his Washington birthplace).
She also got that he had been damaged and that he needed her to find and heal him in order that he could do a great work for his people. She searched for 3 years. Finally one day she found him on the street hung over and
dirty. She sent him to shower in her
hotel room and gave him clean clothes to put on. They talked about his life and she spent two
years on his healing. He has been sober
ever since. He also has worked to support other native youth and now to help
Native people to stop the fossil fuel projects that threaten our future.
Again in this story I am amazed by the faithfulness of this native medicine
woman to believe she could find grown up, a man who she had seen only as a vision of as
a boy. She had the faith that the vision was real and that she could find
him with virtually no clues or directions.
I am awed that she had the dedication to persisted for three years till she found him and two more years through his healing. I am again struck that
only God can plant such visions. And
from the small act of making sure someone gets some photos, to the medium act
of being a pest till you get the expert answers you need, to dedicating of years and years to the healing of another. It is so clear how deeply we are all connected
to each other and how critical a difference our faithfulness makes in the lives
of others.
What have you heard? Have you been faithful to it? How has God used you for the healing of
others?
