In the In-Between

I sat on the cold window ledge and leaned my forehead against the glass, looking out at the hospital garden. Brown earth, dried and brittle, had replaced the green of months before. I looked up at a bleak sky. Bare-branched trees broke solemn clouds.

I dislike in-between spots, those adolescent-awkward, neither-here-nor-there, twilight zones of somewhere places.

If it’s going to be cold and gloomy, at least it could snow, I thought. The dismal atmosphere seeped into my bones, into my mind, and into my heart. I couldn’t seem to move, didn’t seem to care. January and February are like that for me. The blues of winter and an uncomfortable foreboding at the start of another year fills me with melancholy.

But that year was different. It followed on the heels of a terrifying nine-month roller coaster: Will my daughter live or will my daughter die?

I turned to where she sat, a huddled mass of flesh in a wheelchair, staring ahead, unable to move or speak, and I felt paralyzed myself. Like transparent paper, a new picture of my daughter transposed over the old, and in a stupor of malaise I dwelt between them, afraid to let go of the daughter I once had and hesitant to claim the one before me. Grieving my loss, I didn’t know how to move ahead through the dark tunnel called tomorrow.

“Do what’s right today,” my husband had said that morning when I called to tell him I didn’t know how to go on. When I said I couldn’t do this anymore. And when, for the thousandth time in nine months, I really wondered if a person could die from crying.

I thought, I will not be here in a year. When February comes around again, I will not still be in this spot of unknown. Life will not remain on hold. Things will change for the better or for the worse, and with it, this deep grief.

I think the disciple Peter may have felt some of this after his world turned upside down.

“Follow me,” Christ invited, and Peter did.

Then it all seemed to take follow a most unexpected script. Peter denied Christ. His Lord was crucified. Then marvel of all miracles, Jesus rose from the dead, only to promise to leave again. Nothing was as Peter had imagined, as he’d expected. Everything had changed. The future he’d anticipated no longer existed. So he went fishing. That’s what you do if you’re a fisherman.

And the risen Christ met Peter on the shore.

“Do you love me?” he asked Peter not once, not twice, but three times. “Do you love me more than these?” he asked.* The question grieved Peter’s heart, stirring the hurt of his own failure and the uncertainty of where he found himself.

Jesus’s question echoed in my own heart. “How much?” I imagined him asking. “Will you love me when you can’t see me? When you can’t touch me? Do you love me enough to die for me?”

Soul anguish exists in the wait, in the in-between. But in that space, faith grows. It is where I learn to walk by the faith of one step at a time, of giving all and loving completely, and of doing the right thing today.

On the shore the risen Jesus said to Peter, “Follow me.”*

I pushed my daughter down the tiled, walled corridor of the hospital. In the bleak light of that day, I could still trust what I couldn’t see. I could let go of tenuousness and grasp certainty.

Glass hospital doors slid silently open. I rolled her out into the chill of a moist February day. I glanced around to make sure we were alone, and then looked up into the heavens.

“I will follow you today,” I said. My words faltered as I spoke with teary determination, but they lifted my burden and warmed my heart with a new sort of joy.

Years of Februarys have passed. My three granddaughters buzz like honey bees around the power-chair throne where my daughter now reigns. Twelve, nine, and seven, their chatter is full of exclamation marks, wide eyes, and expansive gestures. They talk about what a friend said, the new boy in school, and the latest movie they want to see. My daughter, delighted, throws her head back and laughs. Her glasses are askew, knocked about by a hug from her littlest.

Although disabled in body, my daughter remains strong in spirit. Step-by-step faith has borne us from then to now. It has paved a way through one medical crisis after another, from despair to hope and back again, a declaration that God owns even our in-between spaces.

*John 21:15; 19 NIV

Sylvia Schroeder and her husband care for missionaries world-wide with Avant Ministries. Captivated by God’s Word, Sylvia writes with the perspective of someone who has lived and raised four children overseas. Twelve grandchildren in her heart often wiggle onto her pages. She blogs at When the House is Quiet.

Photograph © Anh Phan, used with permission

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