Right now I am sitting on a lay-down chair in my daughter's warm hospital room on a cold, snowy day... and I feel especially aware of the irony of it all.
Firstly, I am so thankful to the Lord for letting Kate's surgery today go so smoothly. This was a real blessing for her and for me and Amy.
We left the house at 5am, and made our way cautiously (and safely) to the hospital. Kate had been in a great mood up until the time they picked her up and carried her away from her Mom and Dad into the OR. They began with the ear tubes and were done before we knew it. The cleft repair and minor lip revision took a little longer (about an hour and a half). She's been a combination of grumpy, scared, mad, hurting, confused, apprehensive, and sleepy all day. Honestly, she has slept and cuddled most of the day, with short bouts of crying mixed in. I knew she'd want Mommy immediately, but I was thrilled that she allowed me to comfort her quite a bit! We will talk to the surgeon more tomorrow, but the roof of her mouth looks good from our perspective. On the other hand, she may have messed up some of the stitching on her lip "touch up."
Probably not coincidentally, I finally finished reading "Everything Must Change" by Brian McLaren, as Kate lay sleeping on my chest this evening. This is one of those super hard books. It focuses on how the world is caught in this suicidal web of overconsumption in pursuing prosperity, violence in trying to attain security, and inequality that results from attempting to guarantee the other two... and it's all reinforced by a broken "framing story." He paints a bleak picture where we're all caught up in this self-destructive mess, none more so than the United States. It's shocking to read about our military... that we have enough nuclear weapons to destroy ten planet earths, or that it costs $100 million per day to keep our weapons poised and ready, or that so much of our economy is based on arms sales (even often supplying weapons to both sides of a conflict). McLaren writes about our unsustainable consumption and our gross exploitation of the world's poor.
But he also talks about hope and a new vision. This is where it gets hard because it calls for rejecting or "defecting from" the ordinary way the world works which is so pervasive and all-encompassing in favor of "the kingdom of God." Besides feeling powerless because it seems like there's little I can do to change the big societal problems, it challenges me with the inconvenience of doing many little things I CAN do (and by doing so begin to change some of the culture around me).
Ok, so here's the irony. I'm acutely aware all the sudden of how this is related to today. Inequality. How many of those here who lost their power today in the ice storm are cognizant of the millions who live without it daily? Prosperity. Did I ever think about the kind of prosperity system that makes possible a surgery like this? What do people on the other side of the world (particularly the developing world) think about my ease of access to medical care, especially non-life-threatening, life-enhancing medical care? What's it mean that by virtue of her residence in the US, Kate has this kind of care afforded her (almost as a right)? And what do I now do with this? I know as a Chinese orphan, there's a good chance she wouldn't have had this opportunity, and the adoption itself is a part of this kind of living out of the Kingdom. But despite this, is my prosperity somehow at the expense of someone else? In a global community, it seems like I should be asking questions like this. I don't know. (It doesn't help that I saw a complaint about internet access and read about a shopping trip described as "heaven" earlier, either.) Don't get me wrong, I'm extremely grateful that Kate will have benefited from this procedure. I just somehow have this sense that I've unknowingly bought into the Empire of Caesar more than the Kingdom of God sometimes.
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