You Do Not Dress For The Ambulance

There are two of them in your front room, and one is down on his knees beside you asking what day it is.

You know what day it is. That is not the trouble. The trouble is that from where you are lying you can see straight through into the kitchen, and the sink is full, and it has been full since Sunday, and there is a pan in it with something burnt on the bottom that you kept meaning to get to.

So the first whole sentence you say to a man who drove eleven miles in the dark to come and get you is an apology about the sink.

He says it is fine. He is not even looking at the sink. He is looking at your eyes, and at the color of your hands, and at the watch on his own wrist, and he says something to the other one that has numbers in it.

You keep going anyway. You tell him you have not done your hair. You tell him the mail has been stacking up on the hall table since the twelfth and the house is not normally like this. You tell him about the pan twice, and he says yes ma'am twice, and neither time does he turn his head toward the kitchen.

Then they cannot get the stretcher around the corner into the hall.

And the younger one takes a screwdriver out of his own pocket and lifts your front door off its hinges and stands it against the wall, careful, like it belongs to somebody, which it does.

You apologize for the door too.

They lift. The porch boards go by, then the yard, then the open back of the thing with the light going around, and somewhere in there a hand takes hold of yours and does not let go, and nobody has said one word about the pan.

And the thought that goes through you, the one that will still be there later in a room with a rail on the bed, is not about the fall at all.

It is that you spent your whole rescue apologizing for the condition you were in when it showed up.

As though there had ever been a version of this where you got a week's notice. Where you did the pan, and set your hair, and put the mail in a drawer, and met them at the door in your good coat, worth the eleven miles.

Nobody Has Ever Been Asked To Tidy First

Let me put the plain thing on the table before anything else.

You are being helped in the condition you are actually in tonight, not in the condition you would have arranged given a week and a bit of notice. That is not a kindness I am extending to you. Mark 2:17 has Jesus saying out loud, in a room full of people who were counting, exactly who a physician comes for, and the Holy Spirit is the one who never let that sentence get tidied up in two thousand years of quoting it.

Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. I came not to call the righteous, but sinners.Mark 2:17

Now read who that sentence leaves out. The well. The ones with nothing wrong. They get nothing out of it, not because He is stingy with them, but because a physician goes where the sickness is, and there is no work for him in a house where everybody is fine.

Which turns the whole thing you have been doing on its head. You have been trying to qualify by getting a little better first, and getting a little better first is the one condition in that verse that would have sent Him on past your road. His word puts the sick at the front of the line, and the Spirit of God has never once been sent to fetch the improved version of anybody.

And the apologizing did not start out of vanity. That is worth saying plainly. The state of a house feels like evidence about the state of a person, and somewhere back down the years that got quietly agreed to, and every visitor for a good while has been somebody to get ready for. So when the ones who came for you finally arrive, the old habit stands up and starts talking about a pan.

Now do not hear a word against the pan. It matters. Somebody is going to do that pan, and it will not be on the night of the rescue and it will not be by you on your own. Titus 3:5 says He saved us not because of works done by us in righteousness but according to His own mercy, by the washing of regeneration and renewal of the Holy Spirit, and look hard at the order in that sentence. The saving, and then the washing. Both of them His. You were never asked to arrive clean, and the cleaning is not optional and not skipped. It simply comes after, and He is the one who does it.

One plain thing here, said straight. If the condition you find yourself in has come with thoughts of ending your life, or of not being around for the cleaning up, then tell one living human being out loud tonight. A neighbor, a doctor, a pastor, an emergency line. In the United States, 988 answers a call or a text at any hour. Anywhere else, emergency services or a local crisis line will take it. That is not a failure of faith and it does not make anybody a burden. God put real rescue into human hands on purpose, and making that call is obedience, not defeat.

So here is the sentence to carry out of this. You do not dress for the ambulance. Nobody in the history of getting hurt has been asked to tidy first, and no one ever will be, and Isaiah 64:6 is honest enough about our best clothes that nobody needs to pretend the good coat would have helped. You have been received as you are, at the hour it happened, and the same Spirit who carried that verse to you is in the room now.

And the door. Notice what they did with the door, because it is the truest picture of God in the whole story. The doorway was too narrow, so the doorway came off. They did not leave you in the hall until you shrank to fit the opening. You were carried through a gap that got widened for you, and Ephesians 2:8 says the whole business is a gift and not a wage, and the Holy Spirit is the one who took the hinges off.