Heartland Prayer

Editor’s Note: Jim Schaap, long a fixture here on the Reformed Journal blog, has been absent recently. First, a cataclysmic flood last June, followed by some serious health challenges have made blogging regularly impossible. But we received this from Jim and are pleased to share it with you.

Greg is an able guy with a whole left side whose usage left him when he had a stroke, a bad one. Word on the street is that he took some drugs, cooked some meth–I don’t know. His assigned lunch seat is right across from mine. His dinner plate sports an inch-high aluminum fence the cook slips on so he can eat without pushing his lunch all over the table. He has only one functioning arm and hand.

He told me a couple of lunches ago that John, a third member of our table’s group, had been having headaches that morning at breakfast. I’d already finished when they’d eaten. Greg said he didn’t know how John had fared after breakfast that morning, so quite suddenly he stops pushing his dinner up against that little silver wall his plate comes with, puts down his fork, backs up his wheelchair, then hikes it across the center of the lunch room floor and sallies up to Rosemary, who’s been eating lunch herself by this time. 

Rosemary is John’s wife. Some days she comes into the lunch room in a machine that stands her up as if she were going to attack her food. 

I didn’t hear the conversation, and John is still a no-show. If people don’t show up at Heartland, you send out the posse. In this case, a word from John’s wife will be all anyone needs. Sometimes she talks to me or to us, halfway across the room, without looking up from her food. It’s always pleasant. You’d expect nothing less. I’ve come to think of her as a saint.

Rosemary has Parkinsons. She was walking just fine, she told me, until Covid took all her steps away from her. In the dining hall, she eats purposefully with fat, wooden handled utensils that fit her hands. 

I’ve been in Heartland Home for two months. Never dreamed I’d be here that long. Some evil spirit in me robbed me of the strength in my legs, and Heartland Home, Marcus, Iowa, promised and delivered a schedule of rehab I needed.

I left last Wednesday. My legs are hardly healthy, but the therapists say I’m capable of a level of independence that won’t wear down my wife of 52 years. These two months have been difficult—I’m crippled, after all, wheelchair bound—but they’ve also marvelously sweet. 

I don’t hear the news about John until Greg swings that wheelchair back around and heads home.

I wait until he goes after his food. “What did she say? I ask him. John’s a Trump man, has got all the accoutrements–cap, shirt, maybe even a flag–I don’t know. He’s also got a wonderfully droll sense of humor that emerges in a whisper and a smile. Headaches aren’t killers. Chest pains–here–are reason to beware.

Greg looks up from his place across the table from mine, gives me half a stare maybe, as if to say the news he carries is worth more than he bargained for.

“She just said, ‘Pray for him,” and he goes back to pushing goulash up against the fence around his lunch.  “That’s all–‘pray for him.'”

John came back to dinner that night in fine spirits. I don’t know that I prayed for him. Should have. I don’t know that Greg prayed either, but John’s okay. 

Some time later I left Heartland. I honestly don’t know if I’ll walk out of here any more gracefully than I walked in, which is not to say, dear Lord, I’m no healthier. 

So, our good Lord, thank you for helping me witness how it is that a man or woman with no legs can still get around. And bless John and Rosemary and Greg and at least a dozen nurses with whom this 76-year-old cripple fell in love. So much for which to be thankful. Life among the lamed passes along its own quiet truths.