Today is Good Friday. Stay Hopeful. Sunday is Coming.
This song below has some beautiful and touching lyrics:
I will look to the hill and I will not fear...
On the hill, there's a cross.
On the cross there is blood for me, for me.
Bloody and Beautiful.
There is blood for you, too.
Bloody and Beautiful is an unusual statement. Obviously, as a Christian I can understand the concept. It just seems so messy and so full of reality. But I guess that's the point, isn't it? Our sin is more than messy; it's horrific. The price that Jesus paid on the cross was more than horrific.
As a nursing student in East Los Angeles, a gang-ridden area of LA, I worked in the emergency room at night, both learning and putting myself through school financially. At the LA County General hospital, a trauma center, I encountered a wide variety of reality: illnesses and injuries by accident and through violent acts. One particular summer night proved to be a learning experience with a variety of practical applications. There was an emergency delivery in the ER. I found myself with a pregnant woman screaming and me holding her onto the gurney so she wouldn't fall off. She was writhing from labor pains. A young resident doctor, lacking the proper instruments, tore the opening wide to allow the baby to spew suddenly into the world. It was a moment in time I will always remember accompanied by a scream I will never forget. Shocking. Bloody. Painful. And suddenly, full of life. The doctor quickly handed the baby to my roommate and fellow student worker. My roommate was a beautiful young woman who always had tidy hair, lipstick and a pressed and starched white uniform. She stood there with her eyes wide open, holding a bloody and screaming baby in a small open blanket with the umbilical cord still attached to the mother. My roommate and I looked at each other in the eyes and a moment stood still. She was clearly traumatized by the whole situation. I said to her, eyeball to eyeball, as if we were the only people who could hear each other, "Don't drop the baby." She nodded and held on tight. Neither of us had ever experienced anything like this before. We had never given birth or seen a birth or been part of an emergency delivery.
A few minutes later, everything was cleaned up. Mother and baby were fine and they were sent to the County Women's Hospital where they would be taken care of properly.
Thinking back on that situation, it was both bloody and beautiful. As young, twenty-something girls, we were able to see life come into the world. It was a wild roller coaster of an experience. The family had dropped the woman off at the wrong exit of the hospital just as she was crowning . The resident doctor was unprepared since births weren't part of the trauma center protocols. Two young nursing students weren't prepared to handle the situation. But with trained, supporting staff overseeing all of us, it all went down. When a baby is meant to be born, it will be born. A time to be born and a time to die. A time for everything as Ecclesiastes says.
Birth is messy. Life is messy. Death is messy. It's all bloody and beautiful.
Thank you, Jesus, for my life. Thank you for the life of my children and my family. Thank you for being born bloody and beautiful in a filthy barn. Where there is blood, there is life.
Thank you for doing the unthinkable: for dying on a cross in order to be my Savior and the Savior of the world. You were bloody and beautiful as you took on the sins of the world. Where there is blood, there is life.
You are the King of Kings and Lord of Lords, the propitiation for all who will believe.
Today is Good Friday. You shed your blood for us.
We have Hope.
Sunday is Coming.
Amen.
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