A Theology of Waiting in the Emergency Room on Father’s Day

I remember sitting at home with my wife and newborn a few years back, watching a movie and making fun of our two cats, Guacamole and Periwinkle. Without warning, Periwinkle stood up on the couch and fell over, collapsing onto the ground and spazzing out, writhing around on floor. I jumped up from my chair, scooped him up, and looked into his eyes. He was so, so scared. In a blink, he went limp in my arms, completely lifeless.

I don’t know what killed him. I’d guess a heart attack, but who’s to say? Whatever the cause, I think about that moment a lot when I think about death, watching the life leave his eyes and feeling it – actually feeling it – leave his body. Things are heavier when they aren’t breathing. I felt so completely powerless. That night, I buried him beneath a massive catalpa tree, feeling more like my father with every strike of the spade against the dirt. After all, it’s a father’s job to bury dead pets.

This year, I spent Father’s Day holding my one-year-old daughter in the emergency room.

She fell off the couch backwards and the back of her head hit the ground pretty hard. She’s taken tumbles like this before, so I picked her up and rocked her and shushed as she cried. After a few seconds of hard crying, she went limp in my arms, the familiar ragdoll She came to pretty quick, after only a few seconds, but she was lethargic and sweaty and barely responsive. We ran to the car and sped to the hospital to have her checked for a concussion or something worse.

We checked in and took a seat in the crowded emergency room. All I could do was keep reliving that moment where I felt her leave, even if for just a moment, and how heavy she became in the spit second when she wasn’t breathing. I kept thinking about the Facebook posts you see every once in a while about someone’s kid seeming fine after an accident and then taking a sudden turn for the worse. I kept thinking about my cat. But mostly I kept thinking about how powerless, fragile, and vulnerable we are.

After about an hour of waiting, I started to take more notice of the people waiting around us.

It was mostly old people. Maybe they’d fallen or were feeling sick. But there were some younger people, too. One guy in his late twenties was rolled in on a wheelchair covered in a hospital blanket. From what I could tell, he was wearing a nicer button-up short-sleeve dotted with cherries, a proper hipster. His girlfriend walked in after him; she had her makeup done and looked like one of those girls who really loves TikTok. Clearly neither of them had planned to come to the ER today.

There was another guy who refused to keep his mask on who keep groaning and squirming in his seat. Every twenty minutes or so he would get up and go ask the nurses if he could skip the line. “All I need is a shot,” he would say. To be fair, he seemed to be in a lot of pain, but we were all waiting in the same line for things we all believed were important. There is no cutting in the ER. He ended up leaving before being seen, still groaning and shambling through the door.

Except for the fifty-year-old who was led in by what looked to be his daughter and maybe his father. When they asked for his birthday, he couldn’t tell them. “Four…” was all he said, so they fished an ID from his pocket as he kept trying to walk around. The older guy with him just kept saying that he wasn’t making any sense, so they took him straight back. Probably a stroke, but I’m not a doctor.

The next thing I noticed were the shirts people were wearing. One guy who seemed to have had some sort of accident came in wearing a shirt that said “Is My Bike Okay?”, but it was upside down so that people could read it if he were lying on the ground with his head toward you. It’s a funny shirt I guess, but the irony of it exceeds the humor. Unless he wasn’t biking that day, but in that case, why wear the shirt?

One of the most on-theme shirts was one that said “Proud Dad of A Freaking Awesome Daughter”. The back just said, “Lu’s Dad”, so I’m guessing Lu made it, and I’m guessing Lu’s dad also didn’t want to be in the ER on Father’s Day.

There was a classic Dunder Mifflin shirt and an even more classic Sponge Bob shirt, but the shirt that really jumped out at me was the one with the American flags that said “Joe and the Hoe Gotta Go.” I bet the guy felt very clever wearing that shirt and slut shaming someone he’s never met. I bet he felt like a big man degrading women like that. And I bet he felt rather Christian while doing it. I guess I can’t know for sure, but in my experience the people who wear those shirts are typically churchgoers.

And then there was the hospital itself. It was clean, I guess, but it didn’t feel that way. The chairs had little rips in the fabric and the paint was fading. The windows were smudged. The paper towel dispenser in the bathroom was out, so they just put a roll on the counter. Two of the three vending machines were out of order but still fully stocked. Perhaps most alarming, there was poison ivy growing in the flowerbeds out front.

The whole experience felt wrong and off. In our two hours of waiting to see if our daughter was okay, the same thought kept finding its way into my mind: it shouldn’t be like this.

The vending machines shouldn’t be out of order. The paper towels should be in the dispenser. You shouldn’t have poison ivy lining your walkways. The hospital should invest in a fresh coat of paint. And the MAGA guy shouldn’t sexually degrade people he disagrees with. And people shouldn’t have to wait two or three hours to receive medical attention.

But more than anything else, as I’m sure the cherry-shirt hipster would agree, we shouldn’t be there to begin with. I shouldn’t spend my Father’s Day worrying about my daughter’s wellbeing. People shouldn’t get old and sick. Babies shouldn’t go limp. Dads shouldn’t have strokes on Father’s Day or any other day for that matter. And people shouldn’t die.

But we do. And that sucks.

I’m a doctoral student studying public theology at Fuller Theological Seminary, so now I’m thinking about what all of this has anything to do with what I’m studying, or vice versa. I mean, the ER is a pretty public place. I know that most theologians have spent time in the ER or waiting by a hospital bed, but I wonder why so many of our sermons and our systematic theologies don’t feel like they have. They are clean and tidy and don’t seem to be asking questions that matter to the cherry-shirt hipster or to the dying. Of course, they are asking questions about life and death and God and sin, but the package they come in seems so far removed from lived experience. They feel more sterile and clinical than the room we were finally called back to.

After almost four hours, our daughter had finally been seen and we received good news. She was perfectly healthy in every way. Apparently, when babies hit their heads they sometimes cry so hard that their body shuts down and resets. It’s wild. We left the ER and went back to the house to celebrate Father’s Day and try to put the whole ordeal behind us, just hoping out-of-state insurance will cover it.

But I know not everyone left the ER with good news that Father’s Day, if they left at all. And I know that there are thousands and thousands of people all across the country waiting hours to hear bad news. There are people kneeling by hospital beds praying to silent gods. People are dressing up for dates that won’t happen or hugging their children for the last time.

And all I know is that we need to do our theology in a way that matters to them. Our theologies need to feel like they know what it’s like to spend hours in the dark. Otherwise, how helpful are they for the time we spend waiting?