Livin' the dream...

As I entered the room this awful, wretched, stench permeated my nostrils. I had simply come into my patients room to check his blood pressure and as my eyes searched the room for what was causing this deathly smell I was fixated on the emesis basin that was full of diarrhea. But it just wasn't in the emesis basin on the floor. Nope. It was splattered all around the floor. Just as I laid eyes on it (trying not to let my jaw drop) my patient looked over at me and said "sorry about the mess."

Excuse me?!? What?!?! Sorry about the mess! This fully functioning man was casually lying in his bed. Come to find out he had been laying in there for over an hour with this mess! Could he not smell it? Was he not embarrassed enough to try to clean it up?

Apparently not.

In my head I was thinking I just came in for your blood pressure, NOT to play maid and clean up your mess. AND in what universe would a person sit in a room with a nasty mess like this and not call the nurse's station? Sure we get paged twenty times an hour by his neighbor for silly little things but in this case no page. Makes complete sense.

I did what I had to and got out as soon as I could. As I recounted the story to my sister I was crying in laughter at what my life had become. Never in my life could I have pictured the things I would encounter in the real world of nursing as I was "livin' the dream."

I have a feeling a lot of the time people look at their life and realize it is not entirely what they had planned. I know I have been wrestling a lot with this lately. But when you're contemplating it I know I often feel alone in that feeling; like everyone else's life seems to be going great and I am the only one's whose is not right on tract. I recently decided to start reading through Matthew. As I looked at Jesus' genealogy (I know I usually skip these areas too because its just a bunch of names) but I realized there were five women named in this list. Obviously there is a purpose for these five women to be mentioned. While I am no scholar and cannot say for certain why these women specifically are listed I felt the Lord telling me to look into their stories and revealed this truth to me: life does not always work out the way we plan BUT He can and will use our lives, which are full of purpose, to accomplish great things.

Let me just break it down for you according to Emily's paraphrase real quick. Tamar lost her husband. As the law would have it a male in the husband's line would marry Tamar and have babies with her to carry on the name. Well lets just say her husband's brother wasn't feeling the have babies part so he used old school birth control methods and Tamar was never able to have children. Her life was not turning out the way she had planned so she posed as a prostitute, lured her father in law, and got pregnant. Talk about NOT the way you think your life will go as a little girl. Then we meet Rahab. A prostitute herself, again not what every girl dreams of becoming but what desperation drives you to. She laid her life on the line to house two Israelite spies in exchange for her family's lives being saved when her city was conquered. Then we have Bathsheba. I think most people are familiar with her story. While washing on her rooftop the King summons her. No one denied the King in those days so what was she to do? After a night with the King she got pregnant. Then King David, in a pickle, had her husband killed. Bet when she married Uriah she never thought she would end up in an affair that would lead to a love child and eventually lead to her betrothed's death. Ruth is next on the list. After loosing her husband, never a though in a girl's mind as ideal, she moves with her mother-in-law, again probably not ideal in a girl's mind, to an unfamiliar land. Eventually she meets her kinsman redeemer but the road was not easy. Then we have the famous young engaged Mary who is looking forward to life with her man. A little bump is thrown her way when she is impregnated by the Holy Spirit. She was almost let go by her man and had to say goodbye to the life she had envisioned because she was entrusted to raise our Saviour. Talk about crazy.

I bet those women had no idea in the middle of their crazy lives that they would be in the Messiah's lineage (well okay I suppose Mary knew once the Holy Spirit had visited her)! As I read about these women I realized I suppose at one time or another in our life we walk through a time where we are sarcastically "livin' the dream." Life is not exactly what we thought it would be. BUT I am holding on to the fact that God can take any circumstance and use it to accomplish great things. There is hope in the middle of chaos and uncertainty.