I’ve been having some trouble with my commute.
Kansas City, with no functional, centralized public transit system, is a city of freeways. It has byways and beltways, bridges and merges, and, as I lately am painfully aware, near-misses and sheer miracles. Also, it’s summertime, which means construction. And my schedule at the hospital often means a choice between driving at the height of rush hour or sacrificing precious hours I could spend with my family. Or, you know. Sleeping.
Additionally, I have discovered something: there is a lot that we take on faith in rush-hour highway commuting.
You do, anyway. I, on the other hand, just haven’t been able to get with the rhythm. Not lately. I want more information, you see. What is that car going to do? And that one over there? And—ohmygosh—there’s a huge truck in my way and an entire lane obscured from view. And he’s braking and she’s coming over and I have to move right now but I can’t and—
This is new. I have spent a total of seven years making some version of an urban highway commute, but until now, I never noticed the rules.
You probably haven’t either—we drive largely with our bodies, and if you’ve been lucky, there’s likely been no reason for your head to become overly involved.
Suddenly, though, I’m as a stranger in a strange land on these roads I’ve traveled for my entire adult life. And that means the rules have become as obvious as they are impossible. And they go like this:
Make a plan. Pick your opening. Use your turn signal (this one’s a bonus for non-assholes and those who like to minimize their risk of collision). And finally—and, it should be noted, swiftly—make your move.
I’ve been struggling with all of it. In fact–particularly on those mornings when I cross the Missouri river, take the short ramp that connects one highway with another, and then, in the space of about one minute, merge across FIVE lanes of rush-hour traffic to take a left exit–I find myself remembering days of carefree lane-changes like I’ve lost the Golden Age of Driving.
I’m sure commuting “back then” wasn’t as magical as I’m making them seem in my mind . . . but I do know that things were different.
Because then, I wasn’t skittish.
Because then, I wasn’t scared.
As it turns out, being at the scene of a major accident 36 hours before starting CPE may have had some effects. Especially when stressed. And tied to both a commute in the morning and a midday trek between hospitals. And when absolutely, bone-wearily tired.
But each day, I get up and do it again. And most evenings, I am confronted by the dreaded onramp at Metcalf and 435. Right at 5 p.m.
The main thing is, I can’t ever get on it—there is no space for me, with cars overhanging the intersections for more than a mile before the onramp, people cutting in, and two lanes merging into one just in time to fly into six other lanes (that’s on ONE side, my people) which are moving or not moving as impatience and construction and rush hour dictate.
So that’s happening, or rather it’s not happening, and it’s been taking me 90 minutes on alternate routes to travel home.
on second thought . . .
Meanwhile, I’ve been wanting to explain to you about CPE—what I see, what I hear, how I hold those things in the charged moments, and what I do later with what remains.
I’ve been wanting to share some of the messiness in hopes that you might also see the magic.
I’ve been hoping to communicate, somehow, my fledgling understanding of what all of this means in the larger process of growing into ministry.
But I’m not ready yet.
So I won’t tell you that I’m learning about ministerial authority when I claim my space in the trauma bay, or work alongside the medical team, or stand in front of an altar in a chapel not my own.
I won’t assert that I’m learning about God in every patient room, about my faith every time I record a name in the “death book,” about myself in the moments that I spend on my knees in the chapel.
I won’t describe how I’ve learned patience in the refraining from clobbering, or perseverance in the wanting to quit.
And I will say when I struggle as hard as I have been lately with theology . . . in fact, with life . . . it’s challenging to decide whether I’m assigning meaning out of truth or out of need.
Which means that perhaps it’s suspect even to link these things.
So I won’t try. No point. Not yet.
Instead, I will just tell you this:
I’ve been doing CPE.
The experience, taken in total, has been one of the hardest things I’ve ever done.
I fight several battles every day. And while my toughest opponent is myself, what I’m learning is how to stand my ground with everyone else.
And that when I do that, even by myself, I am not alone.
And today, my people, I got on that road.
The one that leads to my home.
There were just as many cars as before.
There was no magical open space.
But then I made one.
Out of a possibility.
I hooted. And cheered. I made it home in 45 minutes.
And I am going–in the same way that I will definitely hold hands and invoke Spirit and be present–to do it again tomorrow.
-j
