all-access pass
In the hallway, I find dots of blood, tiny and faint, each pressed by the ball of a foot, maybe, into a miniature Rorschach, the lot of them an evidential path of wounding I follow from just outside the laundry room all the way down to Adam’s bedroom door, where they abruptly end. I am talking to my parents on the phone, and I squat down to examine one of the tiny blots and then walk back to the laundry room to fish a wash cloth out of the basket, to dampen it, that I might retrace my steps, erasing the dried splotches while listening to Mom and Dad describe their frustrations over getting in touch with their doctor.
“I sent a message down the patient portal last week,” Mom is saying, “and no one answered. So, today I called.”
The problem, it seems on the surface, is one of accessibility, and as I consider this, I remember something Dane Ortlund explored in his significant book, Gentle and Lowly, that by implication the lowliness of Jesus made Him the most accessible human ever.
I once heard prayer described as an all-access pass to the fall-on-your-face awesome, all-powerful, sustainer and creator of everything. The writer of Hebrews said that it’s like those of us who are in Christ can confidently stride right into the throne room of God and receive mercy and grace to meet our needs.
Imagine, Mom and Dad, from where they sit now in their living room, able to walk right into an immediate audience with their doctor today. Or Adam, because I can trace this blood in the hall right back to him, walking right in to show me he’s hurt and to seek my help.
An all-access pass, and yet, we fall into seasons of prayerlessness.
“Oh good,” I say, rubbing at a pain print in the floor right beside my foot, so faint I’d not have seen it except that it sits in the way of all the others. “I’m glad you called.”
“Well, they said I’d have to visit the office,” Mom says. “Just someone at the desk, probably knowing nothing about me or my situation.”
Even without the obvious trail of blood leading right to Adam’s door, I’d have known this to be his blood spilled, because had Riley been bleeding, she’d have announced the situation, narrating aloud her strategy for cleaning it up. For that matter, had Riley seen the blood at all, I’d have heard the commentary, all her guesses as to what these splotches were and why they trace a navigational line down the length of the hall. She’d have told me directly too, but only because she’d also know the prints weren’t hers, would have found me in the kitchen or even in the bathroom where I’d closeted myself away, turning her hand sideways to punctuate the air as she said, “Um, Mom? I’m sorry to interrupt you, but I found some blood in the hallway.”
She’d have curled her lip the way she does when she feels particularly disgusted, especially while forming the word blood with her mouth, a reaction which, now that I think about it, seems reserved with some exclusivity for her brother’s messes.
Funny thing, but although in most ways my Autistic two seem to be exactly opposite sides of the same coin, they both seem convinced that physical wounds and illnesses point to some wrongdoing or character flaw, despite our best efforts to show compassion and insist otherwise. The things I’d expect them to hide they do not hide, but this entirely expected naturally human part of mortal life they hide, guarding against any notion at all that they aren’t physically just fine.
If Adam were here right now, if I walked up to him and said, “Hey, did you hurt yourself this morning? Were you bleeding?” He’d say, in his deep, pronoun mixing way, “No. You’re okay. Doing good right now.”
My dad is talking about how, because of the sheer size of the patient population, doctors aren’t the ones who respond to patients anymore unless you’re sitting right in front of them. “I’m pretty sure the doctors don’t even see the messages,” he’s saying, with some frustration. “But we’re old. It’s hard for us to make an appointment and go in every time.”
Mom and Dad want help but can’t reach it.
Adam resists receiving help he needs, and anyway, he would say if he could, “I have Autism. It’s hard for me to put it all into words.”
However we slice it, disconnection, ironically, is the gaping wound of so-called hyperconnected humanity. Blood has been spilled, too, though it isn’t ours, rushing in to repair the damaged tissue, but for some reason this healing we all need is a thing we’d rather hide than own up to.
“That’s so frustrating,” I’m saying to Mom and Dad, commiserating, because I know all the miscommunication that goes on with the doctor’s office makes them not even want to try. “Did I tell y’all I found drops of Adam’s blood in the hall this morning? Looks minor, but I’ll have to investigate.”
When it comes to Adam’s needs, I am a detective, always watching, always asking God to show me what I need to see, because I know Adam will never tell me. I laugh sometimes over the questions I’m asked in offices, questions that only seem to underline how relatively quiet an Autistic life can be in adulthood. Adam could be enduring any number of things, and as intuitive as God’s allowed me to be about my son, there are limits to what I can know apart from him telling me. So, I pray, because I believe only God knows everything.
You’d think with all our struggle to communicate, our inability within the bounds of human capacity to meet the needs of others and receive help for our own, with all our disconnection and division, difficulty and disability and despair, we’d only be reaching harder in prayer. But maybe we’ve gotten so used to misguided miscommunication, to silent and lonely endurance, to our brokenness in giving and receiving love, we’ve lost faith. Maybe we think of prayer as another patient portal where petitions go to die or an impersonal call center we only contact when we can find no solid way to help ourselves. And anyway, we’ve all got our reasons why it’s hard to make use of an all-access pass to an ever-accessible God just to ask and to seek and to knock our way to the answer. Maybe it isn’t mercy and grace we’re really looking to receive either, even if that’s how real healing happens.
“What happened, do you think?” Mom asks, concern for Adam naturally overriding her own concerns.
I am looking in his room now for broken things—busted plastic or shattered glass or something even more sinister, kneeling down on my knees and running a hand through the dust under his bed, and I am thinking how absolutely glad I am, how thankful, that even on an imperfect and cracked-up mom like me God has made this tiny impression, like a Rorschach blot of His own healing blood imprinted with His supernatural compassion. Because the truth is that I don’t have to be good at articulating my needs or as faithful as I should be in prayer to receive the help I need from God. No, the ever-accessible, gentle and lowly King comes still, bending down to dirty His hands in the dust where I live, coming after me with love and healing in His hands, while yet I’m still a long way off. His capacity for such things has never been about how good I do anyway, but only really about how good He is and how well He loves His own.
