Faith & Spirituality

by Scribe Leaf Library · 1 min read · 0 views

Grace didn't feel particularly close to God in the hospital waiting room. She felt tired, and scared, and unsure whether the prayers she was saying were landing anywhere at all, which is the part nobody tells you about faith during the hard seasons — that it often feels less like certainty and more like showing up anyway, again, without much evidence that showing up is doing anything. An older woman sat beside her for four hours that day, a stranger, there for her own husband's surgery, and somewhere around hour three she reached over and simply held Grace's hand without asking permission or offering advice. "I'm not going to tell you it'll be fine," the woman said. "I don't know that. I just know it helps to not wait alone, and I figure that's most of what faith actually is most days — not knowing how it ends, and staying in the room anyway." Grace's father recovered. The stranger's husband didn't, and Grace only learned this months later, running into her by chance at the same hospital, this time on the other side, sitting with someone else's frightened daughter. "Same waiting room," the woman said, almost laughing. "Guess it's where I do my best praying." Grace has thought about that sentence more than any sermon she's heard since — that the woman had lost the thing she'd been praying for, and kept showing up to sit with strangers anyway, because the sitting had never really been about the outcome.