Doctor’s waiting room
The GP waiting room is no more. The place of buzzers, faded magazines, self-help leaflets, hard seats and the endless news channel feed has ironically in itself become a health risk. And like many casualties of the pandemic, it has closed its doors. Many other aspects of normal GP life have changed, possibly never to re-emerge. The face to face appointment has been replaced by telephone triage, video calls, texts or emails with often blurry images of skin rashes, which I endeavour to diagnose. When patients do attend in person we keep our distance. Gloves, apron, visor and mask form a very visible barrier, concealing the non-verbal cues which can help build relationship with my patient, and elicit underlying signs of disease or mental illness.
My colleagues and I now sit in the waiting room. It has become our larger space to grab a coffee and catch up in a socially distanced environment. Patients wait at home, joining an ever growing list of people hoping for hospital appointments and procedures. Others wait for that invitation to a vaccination clinic, hoping the antibodies the jab generates will enable them to reconnect with the outside world.
So where can I seek hope as a GP in this pandemic? On the face of it, it’s hard to find. Long waiting times seem unfixable, finite resources will never meet infinite demands. You feel the frustration, don’t know what to do… there are no words.
God’s waiting room
I’m not good at waiting. As I sit in God’s waiting room trying to make sense of it all, I groan. ‘This is not the job I signed up for.’ ‘I wish I could see more patients face to face.’ ‘I’m exhausted with the monotony of life as it is right now.’ Before I know it I am declaring that life is not what it should be, my groaning is actually self-pity. Implicitly, or sometimes explicitly, I am accusing God and asking, ‘Are you really good?’ My complaints, often mixed with a measure of cynicism, betray the sense of purpose and calling that I had when I came into medicine, and hope feels like it is slipping away.
I’m not alone. The children of Israel, rescued in dramatic fashion from slavery in Egypt, with the promise of becoming a great nation still echoing in their ears, groaned before the Lord, questioning his goodness in the wilderness. Job’s groans ‘pour out like water’ having lost his wealth, his home, his family and his health. The psalmist in distress remembers God and groans (Psalm 77:3) as his present reality does not seem to equate with God’s promises.
Groaning redeemed
My groaning often exposes my heart. Perhaps a heart which craves comfort and rest, an opportunity to escape endless lists of phone calls, prescriptions, forms and demands. A heart that wants a quick fix, a bank holiday, a fast forward to a day when all things are made right. Yet, as I sit in God’s waiting room, I know God can transform even this heart, and it’s in the waiting that this takes place.
Paul reminds us in Romans chapter 8 that our groaning can be a work of the Spirit ‘as we await eagerly for our adoption to sonship’ (verse 23). Because actually it is right to be dissatisfied with how life is, to be angry at long waiting lists, to weep when we experience shadows of death. Jesus himself groaned when faced with suffering and death in his ministry. As he waited in the Garden of
Gethsemane, contemplating the cup he was being asked to carry, ‘his sweat was like drops of blood falling to the ground’ (Luke 22:44). So in Christ this groaning isn’t self-pity, it can be an active concern and burden for others which presses me further into the mess and mayhem to actively work for good. There I believe God begins to redeem my groaning for good purposes.
Hope on the horizon
My job takes me to intensely personal places with people. I’m humbled as I watch a daughter wait with her dying mother, the groaning is intense, but in that there are beautiful moments of parent-child dependence, sacrificial giving and tears, all of which reflect the anguish of Gethsemane and the agony and separation of the cross. This is where our hope begins. As Psalm 77 continues, the psalmist remembers the Lord again, but this time he sees him as he truly is. He remembers his ‘miraculous deeds of long ago’ (verse 11). Thankfully, thousands of years later, I watch and wait from a greater vantage point.
As the psalmist remembers the Exodus, so I remember the greatest deliverance of all, which freed us not just from slavery, but from sin and death itself. My hope is now in the risen Jesus, who redeems and transforms my heart. But not only that, his bodily resurrection actually confirms that what I do daily in my physical life, and in the physical lives of others as a GP, matters to God. By working as God’s redeemed people, we can give others a glimpse of the way things are supposed to be, and they can be touched by the transformational power of the gospel. We are modelling God’s ultimate work of restoration when he will truly make all things new—and better than we can imagine.
Easter changes everything
So because of Easter we have the joy of being God’s co-workers. The pandemic has helped us find the hurting places, and we know that Jesus has been there before us. We groan because we are actively engaged, and as we long to make it better, we are united with God’s purposes, and we realise with certainty what God has begun he will bring to completion (Philippians 1:6). This will be the final consummation of our hope. All those things that seem terrible will be in service of the good God is bringing about both now and in eternity to come. May we patiently and humbly remain in God’s waiting room of change until that day.
Tim Huey is a GP and a member of Whiteabbey Presbyterian Church.
You can access more Easter blogs and resources here.