How was your Friday night?

Mine was going well–Costco pizza for dinner, kids in bed at a decent hour, time together with the husband… Then the peace suddenly ended with the accidental snapping off of a receptor to one of my hearing aids. It was just a split second and infinitesimal tug (!!) that made it completely non-functional.

Doesn’t it seem such a small catalyst to the *GASP* disruption of my peace? Yes. Yes, it does.

But my current foray into the external workforce is a volunteer gig at a hospital on Saturday mornings. My task is to do jobs that enable the care team to do theirs. I also interact with patients and families to ease their minds in whatever way I can.

In this work, I have spent time listening to patients talk about their families and hearing personal histories and transformations. I have enabled people to process through the stress it can be in simply going to the hospital. I have made and listened to awful jokes. I run errands or procure candy bars or grapes or magazines or puzzles. Often, I simply spend time with lonely people.

Saturdays are typically days that I turn my hearing aids up to full volume to hear the quiet voices and catch mumbled requests. It’s a day I feel extra useful to the world outside my familial sphere.

If you didn’t catch it, a day in the life of a volunteer involves a lot of hearing and listening and comprehending.

So, re: breaking my hearing aid. It sent me immediately back to my most recent malfunction of equipment in the last place I felt useful to the external world: the classroom.

The Magnitude of my Failure

Let me say, and not lightly, working through a school day with hearing loss was traumatic for me. Hearing aids aren’t omnidirectional; they dampen sounds from left and right and behind, which meant I didn’t always hear side conversations and seemed partial to some and not to others.

They do magnify sound in front and do so equally on left and right. This is important to note because when one of them goes out, it’s difficult to work with just the other.

Our hearing is a neural process that takes information from the two pathways of our ears and forms one coalescing impression from that information. This happens on both sides of the brain, then it is interpreted together.

Need a better illustration? Try putting a cup over one ear and closing your eyes, then ask someone to talk to you. When you hear clearly from one side with the other side’s hearing changed, like what happens if one ear is covered (or not working), it becomes really hard to understand. In fact, it is mental work to do something that should be a passive understanding.

And working with middle school children is mentally rigorous to start with.

It is matching energy and stimulating more.

It is driving routine and systems when every piece of the substrate would rather… not.

It is speaking carefully and calling children out in ways to which they will respond.

It is getting to really know kids through constant curiosity, curated openness, and really, really careful boundary building.

And it is essential that the passive things in your day just work.

When they don’t, the things at stake are not misunderstandings and missed requests. Interacting with middle schoolers, the stakes are the well-being of people who are grown enough to do real damage to one another and themselves and immature enough not to realize how long-lasting those effects could be.

Hearing loss in the school environment was traumatic because, with the vast many inputs of information and the limited processing ability, I didn’t know what I was missing, but I knew I was constantly missing something. I felt helpless to adjust to the nuanced demands my students had as developing humans.

Though I felt I was getting better at the craft of being a teacher, my physical constraints kicked at my knees and rubbed my face in all the things I still had yet to conquer. The hurt was knowing I was missing things and those things were affecting other things to such a grand degree that I knew I could just not comprehend their effects.

I say all of this to explain that I really thought I had worked through a lot of these hurts and the lies they spawned–multiple times–when I exited teaching.

But trauma doesn’t present itself one day in a nice and neat box, ready to be processed, and then quietly retreat into the dark recesses of past.

Trauma is a boggart, a shifting devil, showing up when you count it gone, making you again fight down twisted statements of defect and untruth that you have already watched be unseated and defeated.

That is what makes it trauma. From one hurt morph a dozen related lies. They each must be unfurled and rooted out to finally be, well, not vanquished, but easier to root out the next time, until finally, one day, one shoots up, and it’s hardly even a thought to cut it down.

I suppose the one to be unseated this time was the issue of my usefulness… or lack of it.

So I put all those thoughts about school and students on the back burner, and I said yes to my volunteer work.

My Miracle, Right?

I made it in to the hospital in the morning and ran through the usual routine I created. I checked and tidied the waiting rooms, restocked supply carts, then grabbed an empty cart to take boxes of gloves to each room.

This is usually my “in.” I enter rooms to do this something useful. I preface with my name and my position as a volunteer. Then, I let people know I will ask if they need anything shortly, so they can think about it a moment.

Graciously, every person I interacted with, I could hear. I don’t know what it was about these talkers or these rooms or whatever it was that made it easy to understand them, but I could do all I needed to do.

Which would be my miracle, right?

But lately, I keep getting something. It’s as if God’s spelling out to me that He knows my heart. That He wants me to know that He is looking out for me and He is using me in all I do. I have felt this every time I have gone in to volunteer; my days feel guided. My conversations seem curated. I get theme days from God where He shows me something else that needs my eye or points to an issue or demographic or promise for my eyes.

On this day, His message for me was that His works, even in my life, even with me, are so far beyond my capabilities. That He can use me to reach others no matter the faults I feel are so glaring and detrimental.

How Did He Show You That, You Ask?

In the course of my shift, I entered the room of someone who was struggling to eat. They tried to speak in English, but quickly switched to Spanish.

And I realized I could understand their expressions, their words, the problems they were having.

I have been working at Spanish for more than 12 years. I’ve gotten better at the language and learned more vocabulary with the passing of time. It’s always been my hearing that has held me back at using my knowledge whenever asked. I often just can’t hear well enough to understand, because we all speak with slight variations of what is common knowledge.

But in this moment, comforting this one, fixing their requests with food and helping them eat, communicating with their nurse to help them, I was of great and uncommon use.

In the pit of my weakness, God took me twofold further than what I thought my capabilities were in that day.

It was only maybe ten minutes of time and not life and death, but I got to be the instrument through whom kindness and deference was communicated.

The significance of the day was lost on me as I was going through it. Its weight really hit me as I got back to my car. I recognized that just saying yes to service was enough for God to move His dial where He wanted it to go.

So That is Me. And This is You:

No matter who you are, God has sway in your day, His quill over your life. When you claim His story through Jesus, you begin to see the careful authorship that is His guiding. You begin to understand His priorities. You see how everything fits together to illustrate the goodness He has created, even in the midst of the things that don’t go to plan.

It is through this that you realize that trauma isn’t the stopgap of your situation. It is through embracing His story that you can reject the finality of the hurt and lies. You can say “yes” to steps forward with a purpose beyond what you can currently see.

I hope you are already saying “yes.” I would love to know what sort of themes fill your days. Where does God have His hands on you in your life?

Here for you always,

Alexandra