because i'm just dying.

I spend my mornings handing out meds and smiling real big and hearing stories. 
Six hours of mingling with the people our culture have conveniently labeled "bottom-dwellers". The whole experience is messy and undignified and inappropriate. People spill coffee and shout expletives and clog toilets. It's a space stereo-typed by craziness. It's sometimes loud, and sometimes eerily silent. There have been moments where I'm positive things are going to get physically aggressive. 
Even though I have been practically spit on out of frustration, every morning I come and I have this inexplicable joy bubbling up from deep inside my belly. There truly is nowhere else in the whole wide world that I'd rather be on these mornings then with this squirrel-y group of ragtag people. 
They remind me of myself. Their exteriors are as poor and dirty as my sin, as all the things that have me real tangled up inside. 
And while my well is overflowing with joy, there is hopelessness spilling out their eyes and shame whirling off their skin. I'm standing close enough to inhale it right out of the air between us like second-hand narcotics. And breathe it deeply I must have... because there are slivers of time where I feel the hopelessness and shame too, and those aren't some of my more frequent emotions. I feel the shame of having too much, of being nicely dressed, of being healthy and loved. I feel the hopelessness of not having concrete solutions or answers or the ability to "fix it." 
As each man and woman shares their story and I hear their words, see the strain on their metaphorical spines... I know that I would do anything to cusp my clean palm to the backside of each stench-y neck and pull their foreheads up to mine. And with the pressing of our foreheads and a fist against my chest, my eyes searching theirs, I would whisper so fiercely, 
"You are loved. You are necessary. You are enough."
With the shame and hopelessness swirling in the halls like cloud tendrils riding the wind, I watch even the yoke of the most weary and heavy laden ease just a bit as someone takes the time to listen, to be present. 
______
A couple blocks away, and happening at the same time, is the grocery store and the mall and the coffee shops. All the hippies and hipsters and eco-conscience and wealthy people gather with their re-usable bags and bank-bucks to purchase the sweetest earth-foods the soil has to offer. They stroll the mall, children in tow, with bags upon bags. They sit with friends at the round table, carry on normal conversation about school, about work, about family. There's an abundance of happiness, of friendliness, of "normal". 
No one is spitting in anyone's faces or getting all knotted in anger. Civilized is the word and even the air seems to agree with it's hazy dark filter of beauty. You can't help but feel that the world must be a magical place, must be mostly good. 
I love it. I value it. 
I leave my mornings, and my afternoons are spent here. In coffee shops, in grocery stores, in my home. 
These people certainly don't eat canned goods on the edge of expiration or plan out ways to kill themselves. Or maybe they do. 
We all have our own brand of needs, and the contrast in our world has left me reflecting on my own brokenness. 
I'm home now. Home now from another day of learning, another day of fresh food and healthy relationships. Home now from another beautiful day, and my mind and my heart are having a meeting together and confirming what I've known for some time now: 
I am going to be a psychiatric nurse. 
Never in a million years would I have told you this a couple of years ago, but every day I feel the passion and the necessity growing a little bit more. 
Why? 
It's simple really. 
Because I'm dying for us all to be together. 
The dirty and the clean. The doctor-needing and the healthy. The depressed and the happy. The white and the color-full. The full of life and the barely surviving. The bed-less and the king-size mattress sleepers. I am dying for us to not feel lower or higher, more valuable or less valuable depending on where one sits in society's arena. I wish there were no cheap seats. 
I want to be a psychiatric nurse. 
Because my only solution for this incongruent world is to keep showing up to both segregated tables and hope that with Jesus inside me I can reach these cross-stretched arms wide enough to pull a few more of us around the same table. 
You are loved. You are necessary. You are enough. 
Will you believe it?
Excited for the future,