The Thin Place

This story has a happy ending; I promise.
A few weeks ago, I got a call from my ob-gyn’s office. The caller seemed to take about 12 minutes — not really — to tell me that the results from my recent mammogram seemed a little murky. My words, not hers.
They wanted me to come back for a retest, but they couldn’t get me in for about six days.
I’m really, really good at going from Point A to Point Z at Mach Four speed, and that’s just what I did at the end of the phone call. I considered the possibilities, and then I chose the worst one.
Thank goodness, before I had time to set up housekeeping there, my faith kicked in and I found myself at the Thin Place.
Some people attribute this concept to the Irish, the idea that the distance between heaven and earth can sometimes narrow and we can find a deeper connection to the Divine.
That’s what happened to me after I got the phone call - when I realized that I could soon be on a very different and difficult path. Problems that had worried me the day before just drifted away, and I began to narrow what I was willing to focus on. In conversations with people, I began to back away from topics which were now trivial and unimportant to me. As I waited, I wrapped myself in solitude, and I found comfort in prayer.
Early the next week I went to the doctor’s office for the second mammogram. Still scared. Still quiet.
A few minutes after the test the radiologist grabbed my arm, said everything looked fine, and that she would see me in a year.
Cliches are true. That’s why we use them. I felt like 100 pounds of worry had been lifted from my body, and the car on the ride home was scented with my relief and joy.
That afternoon as I was putting laundry away, I realized that the fear and worry were gone; that I couldn’t feel them at all anymore.
My friend, Carole, explains it this way. “We can’t stay up on the mountaintop. We have to return to our worlds.”
She is referring to the Transfiguration of Jesus, of course, witnessed by the apostles Peter, James and John. Peter, in his wonderful exuberance at the sight of Jesus, Moses and Elijah, offered to make three tents right there. Jesus, in His divinity, led the three men back down the mountain, back to their lives.
I think that’s how life is. We have these special faith-filled moments, and then we return to our regular lives. Our hope is that we can preserve the memories of the care and comfort that our Father gives us in difficult, scary moments.