Industrial strength hand sanitizer. That smell will be on my hands forever.
Secret messages on the PA system. Does code blue mean somebody is dying, or is the building burning down?
Maybe it’s just lunchtime. I might prefer a fire to more jell-o.

Hospitals are magical. Motivational. As soon as you get in one, all you want to do is get the hell out.
But if you’re there, there is something you have to do, some process you have to see through, before they let you go.
A building full of rooms full of people in between, suspended in midair leap, held in space by professional official declaration as much as by plastic mattresses and IV poles with squeaky dragging wheels.

I grew up in church, which felt like the opposite.
No wheels squeaked in the temples of my childhood. Nobody was going anyplace.
It felt like done, established, settled. Dead.
Let there be peace. Be still and know.
This drapery and these chairs and this dusty hymnal donated in loving memory.
For a special tithe you can have your name chiseled into a brick in the walkway.

There might be holy water in the vestibule or a scroll on the door to safeguard you from the in-between time when you are not outside and not inside and not sacred and not profane.
There might be a ceremony to protect you from the liminal moment when you are not single and not married, not a child and not a grown up, not one kind of done and not yet the other kind of done.
Better light a candle and sing a song. The unknown is dangerous. Better get sanctioned and understood and labeled and acceptable.

It’s a teenage feeling.
Delicious anticipatory limbo and loving and hating it, the power and the impotence, all at the same time.
I was so scared of the in-between.
I hated it, and I hated myself for being in process.
I thought if I could just get somewhere, then I wouldn’t be a problem and I would be worth loving.
Please, somebody, anybody, tell me who I am. Please.
I hate labels, but so richly desire one, though I will reject them in succession until I end up with one, like musical chairs, when the song of youth is over.

How does anybody survive those years?

I am old now. I’ve had so many labels. I’ve met expectations and inspired disappointment and been all kinds of done. I’ve been through all kinds of doors.

Six months ago I laid in a hospital bed and they told me they didn’t know anything and we would have to wait and see and it might be okay and it might really not, but we need some more blood and how come you’re not eating?

Nobody could tell me who I was.
Midair.

Maybe because I was too tired or too scared or too old or too far out of options, I stopped praying to know anything.
I forgot all the words I learned in Sunday school, smug words designed to protect me from not knowing.
I said a new secret prayer of emptied out release to the Mystery.

And I became whole, in the way that the bluejay on the fence by my mailbox is whole.

The holy water isn’t there to protect you. It’s there to protect them.
When you don’t know who you are, you can be anything.
You can be dangerous and destructive to the forces of death and doneness.

There is ego on both sides of the door; only the threshold is sacred.
The Kingdom is in the midst.