A Bloody Birthday
Clobbered by grace in the emergency room
My oldest son turns 17 today and I thank God I get to be with him for it. Right after he was born, I had a postpartum hemorrhage. This happens in about 1% of births, and is when the normal bleeding after childbirth goes crazy and you bleed a lot, really fast, and it can kill you. It’s the #1 cause of maternal deaths worldwide. The ambulance and the hospital fixed me up, the hospital chaplain gave me Communion, and I got to live all these years with my son(s).
After being patched up, I read the day’s Gospel1, and part of it was Mark 5:25-34 - The Woman With the Hemorrhage. These coincidences between the Gospel and your daily life happen sometimes, more often than you’d think. There are many hypotheses out there as to why. Mine? Grace.
In the passage, a hemorrhaging woman sees Jesus walk by and just knows that if she can just touch him with her hands - even just his clothing - she will stop bleeding. She fights through the crowd around him, puts up with a great deal of bitching from his followers, sidles up like the crimson badass she is, and catches the very end of his tattered robe. He feels the energy drain out of his own body. He turns around, and he says, “Daughter, your faith has made you well; go in peace and be healed of your disease.” And she is.
I am not going to blow a bunch of Faith Healing smoke in your face right now, or ramble about miracles. We’ll talk about those later. What I want you to know is that right after I almost hemorrhaged to death myself and almost had to say goodbye to my beautiful son forever, I met this lady - this fellow bleeding spirit - in the scriptures. Through our hypovolemic dizziness and fatigue, we rebelliously fought through the horde of territorial Jesus-followers together. We physically touched him together (his robe on her pale fingers, the Eucharist on my anemic tongue, and the warm hands of the nurses on my body), and we were both physically, permanently healed.
It’s not a coincidence. Happy birthday, my beautiful boy!
aka“lectionary”, which is basically a calendar of assigned readings for the day. One is from the Old Testament, one is a Psalm, one is from the Letters, and one is from the Gospels. I get to read and reflect on “The Woman With the Hemorrhage” every year on my boy’s birthday.