Chapter 5
Chapter Five
By the time it was time for her to see Marjorie, she wondered how Terry had managed to do everything by herself. Especially since, from what Hannah could see, Terry spent as much time with the patient as the patient felt like they needed.
That meant the waiting room was often full, and wait times were long.
"Hi Marjorie. I'm Hannah, Dr. Hannah Reynolds."
"I remember. We just met in the parking lot. Your grandmother and I were friends."
"Sometimes when people see me in the office setting, they don't recognize me. I think it's the white coat." She did wear a lab coat. It gave her a spot to keep all of the things she needed to carry around.
"Oh, I think I'd recognize your beautiful nut-brown eyes anywhere. You always had such a sparkle."
Marjorie didn't seem to be giving her a fluffy compliment but rather sincerely talking about something that she had observed. Her words made Hannah smile.
"Not too many people compliment me on my eyes. Thank you."
"I don't know why they wouldn't. They're definitely one of your most striking features."
"You seem to know just what to say," Hannah said, thinking about how being around Marjorie made her feel at ease.
"I feel like I never know what to say. I just say what I think and pray it's for the best."
"I have to really work on my thoughts. I could never say everything I think." And she supposed that was the way it was. Once a person got their thoughts under control, they could afford to say whatever came into their mind.
"I think it's just a matter of getting close to God.
And that's by prayer and reading the Bible.
We often think that we need to do something special, like a certain devotion book or worship services, or that there's some kind of Bible study book or Bible club, but it's really just you and God and God's Word. That’s all it takes. "
"You're right. That seems too simple." She knew it was true, but it did seem like it should be harder somehow.
People always wanted to take the things of God and turn them into some kind of hard-to-do ritual.
When in reality, salvation was simple: just repentance and then belief in Christ. So easy, and yet.
.. humans wanted to make it into a works-based thing that gave them something to strive for.
"I think sometimes we feel like it should be hard because it's so big. After all, we're reconciled with God and saved from eternity in hell. It feels like we should be doing something big to achieve that."
"Exactly. We think we should go around working as hard as we can, doing good works and saying so many prayers or something. But that's not the way it works at all. And if we just take a few minutes to read the Bible, we'd understand that."
"It makes us feel better." She paused. "But there are people who go the other way too.
Use belief in Christ as a get-out-of-hell-free card and then don't think about the fact that God commands us to be holy because He's holy, and that as Christians, we're held to a higher standard.
An impossible standard, because we're supposed to be like Jesus. "
"Yes, it's confusing, I suppose, where we get the idea that we have to work our way into heaven when nothing could be further from the truth.
But because we're going to heaven and because we love God, we want to please Him with our lives.
And in fact, the Bible says that our lives are a reasonable sacrifice. So we give that to God."
"And isn't that hard to do," Hannah said, thinking about how hard it was for her to give up her life. She had plans and dreams and things she wanted to accomplish. And then she hadn't been given a choice about what she was going to do.
"You've had trouble with that?" Marjorie asked gently.
"I suppose so. I suppose what happened that brought me here made me feel like everything I had worked for was going up in smoke."
"But at the end of the day, God knew, and God had to have orchestrated it, or at least allowed it."
"Exactly."
"I feel that way about my cancer. God allowed it. I'm not sure why, and I'm not sure if it's for me or someone else."
"Is that why you're not taking treatments?"
"I suppose I would take treatments if I really felt like God wanted me to, but I just didn't have a peace about it. And I was also scared to death to do it too." She laughed a little.
"So do you think that's why you didn't feel a peace about it?" Hannah had never been quite sure how she could tell whether it was God's will or her own will, her own desires, her own fear talking.
"I told God I would do whatever He wanted me to.
And I just felt like the decisions that I made were the right ones.
I suppose when I get to heaven, I'll know for sure.
But sometimes I also think that God's fine with any decision that we make, you know?
That He'll work it out for good, and as long as the decision isn't a moral one—like if I had to steal medicine in order to take the treatment, I would know that that was not the right decision to make, you know? "
Hannah laughed. "I know. That makes sense."
"Since it was just a matter of taking treatment, which was morally okay, or not taking treatment, which was also morally okay, I felt like there might not have been a specific way I had to decide. You know?"
"That makes sense."
And it really did. That there were some decisions that either way would be fine.
Whether that was true or not, whether it worked or not, Hannah couldn't say for sure.
But she couldn't think of anything in the Bible that said that was wrong.
Although she definitely thought it was always wise to ask for God's guidance and to do what a person thought the Lord wanted them to.
She had to admit that had not been the way she had lived her life. She hadn't prayed at all about what job to take. She'd taken the one that would be the most prestigious. After all, wasn't that why she became a doctor?
She questioned that though. Because she definitely could have a ministry here, looking at Marjorie, who had no medical degree of course, but served the town in a way that would be irreplaceable. That's what she wanted to do: be needed and be a blessing wherever she was.
She and Marjorie talked some more and went over the treatment Terry had given her. Although Marjorie was just in to have some blood drawn and tested.
She was on her way shortly, and as Hannah went to the nursing station to check on her notes, Cassie, the receptionist, asked her if she would be able to squeeze in some stitches.
"Of course." It had been a while since she'd done stitches, but she certainly knew how.
"All right. I already have them in exam room two. Michelle, the nurse, has already done the preliminaries, and we're just waiting for either you or Terry to stitch him up."
"All right. Are the sutures in there?" she asked, confirming with Cassie where everything was, since this was her first time doing stitches at the clinic.
Once she was confident she would have everything she needed, she walked back down the hall to exam room two and went in the back door.
She almost turned around and walked back out. Ben stood inside, with what looked like a deputy.
The deputy had bloody gauze pressed to his hand.
"Good afternoon, gentlemen," she said, getting a hold of herself. She could be professional. She was a professional.
"Hey, Doc," the deputy said.
She glanced at the chart. His name was Gordon.
"It looks like you stuck your hand somewhere you shouldn't have, Gordon," Hannah said, making conversation and noticing that Ben said nothing.
"Just doing what the boss told me to," Gordon said, glancing at Ben.
Ben raised his brows. "I did not tell you to touch that glass."
"No, but you did tell me to look behind the board that was there to see if there was any graffiti sprayed on the back of the gazebo. How was I to know there was broken glass back there?"
"Sometimes our eyes tell us things if we use them," Ben said, a note of irony in his voice.
"That's true, Ben," Hannah said, thinking about how he hadn't recognized her.
She had been mulling that over, maybe not thinking about it directly, but realizing that she and Ben had had enough interactions when they were children that.
.. surely he would've recognized her? She hadn't changed that much. Marjorie had recognized her right away.
And even if he hadn't recognized her looks, surely when she said her name... anyway, she needed to let it go.
"Let me see that," she said after she snapped a pair of latex gloves on her hands and held her hand out for Gordon's hand.
If Ben had a reaction to her words, he didn't let on. And she wasn't going to rub it in. So he didn't recognize her—that was fine. Didn't remember her either—that was fine as well.
"Were you looking at the graffiti on the gazebo?" she asked casually as her eyes roved over the cut, figuring out exactly how she was going to stitch it. It seemed pretty straightforward, but it definitely was deep enough and big enough that it needed stitches.
"Yeah. Someone's been doing a rash of vandalism in town. Normally, we don't have to worry about it, do we, Boss?" Gordon said, glancing at Ben.
She took out her tools and began to stitch up Gordon’s hand.
She wasn't sure whether that was to bring him into the conversation or whether he was trying to get Ben to talk.
Whatever it was, Ben just shrugged his shoulder.
"Whoever it is is getting away with it. As soon as they stop getting away with it, it will end.
Once people see that we punish vandals, the vandalism will end.
It's just a matter of catching them." His eyes narrowed at Hannah, as though he were still considering her a suspect.