Sometimes it’s easy to have an opinion on things.
They’re black and white. Chalk and cheese.
Education is always better than leaving school.
There’s enough medical evidence for smoking to be a bad idea
regardless of its ‘coolness’.
In the same moment on the same day I can love it and hate it
equally and in a different moment on a different day the one emotion can far
outweigh the other.
Similarly my Christianity, my pursuit of a
relationship with God,
is a constant battle between blind faith and certain
disbelief. Yet it is something that has been growing in my soul for so long, a
solid mass with so many delicate vessels and connections it could never come
out without certain risk of death.
In a strange new space recently, I have experienced polar
opposite emotions within situations, in one space in my heart. There is no
spectrum – just one feeling on one side of a line and another on the other.
Clearly separated yet together – like cerebral hemispheres inside a
skull.
The first was earlier this year when in the early hours of
2015, I found myself standing over a 3kg, brand new baby boy, desperately
trying to make sense of the 22 stab wounds to his neck and chest.
I felt my heart tear in 2 down the middle, slowly and crudely
like a piece of paper. On one side, a picture of a person walking backwards out
of the room, curling up with horror, revulsion and nausea at the evil that must
have circled this little boy while he waited to enter the world and how his
first few cries would have been from pain and shock not just him catching his
breath.
On the other side is a picture of a robot, running through
the ABC’s of a trauma and a neonatal resuscitation. Cool and calm and 2 steps
ahead. No emotion. Just doing what it was programmed to do.
The second was yesterday.
I could feel the hospital buzzing from the moment I got the
call about 2 kidneys that had become available for transplant at 5:30am. However, when I went up to theatre to give them the names of the recipients, on the list, above the 2
kidneys and liver transplants was the name of a little boy in ICU and ‘organ
harvest’ in the procedure column.
The whole day I found my mind clambering clumsily from one side of the fence to the other.
Obviously, the excitement and relief that comes with the
hope of 3 children being pulled back from less life is worth all the bubbles in
all the bottles of champagne in the whole world. At the same time though, in
the same building but on a different floor, another family is grieving. Saying goodbye to a slugs and snails and puppy dogs tails 4-year-old little boy who hopefully never saw the car coming. The tragedy of
that is heavy and unimaginably dark.
Science dictates that light and dark cannot exist together –
the presence of the one negates the other.
I’m not sure I agree.
It seems to me they can.
