For Wilshire Baptist Church
“Hmm . . . that’s interesting.”
“What’s that?”
“Your pulse skips a beat.”
I was sitting in the Carter BloodCare mobile unit at Wilshire a couple of weeks ago, going through blood donor prescreening, when everything came to a halt. The young woman checking my pulse let go of my wrist and called her supervisor over. He checked it too and concurred: “Your pulse skips a beat about every 30 seconds.” After asking me some questions about my health and conferring with an on-call doctor on the telephone, they let me give a pint of blood.
We’ve all skipped some beats lately. Our natural rhythms have been thrown off by an invisible virus, but last week a way-too-visible ice and snow storm threw us into a communal arrhythmia. Already we were chasing vaccine appointments and still working out how to get on with business, school, church and life, and then the thermometer plunged and shut us all down. I knew we had reached a new depth of disfunction when vital vaccine appointments and now-familiar Zoom meetings were canceled.
During the freeze, my phone pinged steadily with neighbors on Nextdoor and Ring asking for news about road conditions and power outages, and looking for firewood and heaters, generators and spare rooms, food and clothing and water. It was the high-tech version of the small-town bulletin board. Neighbors responded with encouragement, information and physical help. Warming stations popped up at churches and community centers as long as they were needed or as supplies and power lasted. Wilshire hosted such a place until the pipes broke. After the thaw, LeAnn helped close down a warming center in downtown Garland while I took my father to his first vaccine appointment in Frisco. On the way, we saw cars lined up for miles at a church on Preston Road to get food from a North Texas Food Bank mobile site. Sunday afternoon we dropped off some household supplies at Wilshire to be delivered to residents in the Vickery Meadow neighborhood.
It’s these little things we do that help bridge the skipped beats of each other’s lives. We do it now because someone helped us once upon a time and we want to return the favor, or because we know our time of need will come someday. And sometimes we do it out of a deep-in-the-heart calling that is felt but not seen.
Driving home from my father’s appointment, I sought peace in the sounds of Wilshire’s “Roots” CD. One song, “I Hear a Call” by Tony Arata, offers these words:
I hear a call
Now will I answer
Forsake my all
To serve another
Though darkness falls
Stay a believer
I hear a call
Now will I answer
Back at the blood mobile, they suggested I have a conversation with my doctor about my pulse, and I did through the online message portal. He said if my pulse was totally irregular with no basic rhythm, we should take a look. If it just skips a beat occasionally but returns to a steady rhythm, it’s fine. We agreed that I’m OK.
And that’s the way it is with skipped beats. You really just need a return to the normal, steady rhythm to be OK. Sometimes that happens on its own, and sometimes we need help from each other. And sometimes the problem is hiding until someone holds your wrist and checks your pulse, like in the last verse of that song:
I feel a touch
Now will I hold on
Be there with love
For those with no one
With a kindness such
It lives though I’m gone
I feel a touch
Now will I hold on