Love
Written by Emma McCoy
6 minute read
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Hey everyone! Welcome back to a fun and fictional blog series for the next chunk of time. In this series, I’ll be writing fictional short stories following various familiar characters as they try to walk along the faithful path.
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The point of these short stories is to illustrate our big idea: Jesus grows our hope through uncommon friends. But in order to get to this big idea, we first need some scaffolding. Think of these stories like handholds as we’re climbing toward our big idea. A lot of the time, stories that demonstrate an idea are more helpful than just talking about it, so that’s where the fiction comes in. And the handhold (also called an outcome, or learning target) I’m focusing on in this series is this:
We notice and name signs of hope, and learn to receive it too.
If I could put a huge neon sign around that, I would. In this season at Spring Church, we’re going to be using the language of the fruits of the Spirit (like joy, patience, and faithfulness) as we recognize these gifts in our friends. So follow along these stories as I illustrate what it might look like to notice and name these good things in our friends, and how the naming can give us hope. See if you can spot the fruit of the Spirit that comes up!
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We notice and name signs of hope, and learn to receive it too.
If I could put a huge neon sign around that, I would. In this season at Spring Church, we’re going to be using the language of the fruits of the Spirit (like joy, patience, and faithfulness) as we recognize these gifts in our friends. So follow along these stories as I illustrate what it might look like to notice and name these good things in our friends, and how the naming can give us hope. See if you can spot the fruit of the Spirit that comes up!
You can listen to this story narrated like an audiobook on your favorite podcast app!
Love
A story about a friend who teaches love by living it.
Before Poppy, Eli would be able to tell exactly how many hours he’d spent in a hospital. He had records of all the hours of his internship, clinical hours after being certified as an RN, timesheets of his years working, and every single hour of overtime. There was a record of all his time in a hospital, the data irrefutable, manageable, and easy to track.
But after Poppy was born? The numbers got fuzzy. There were the days spent in the maternity ward after his girlfriend had given birth, which were normal, and then the pediatric follow-ups with the cardiology department, which weren’t. Words that Eli knew, like arrhythmia and inconclusive and aorta, became strange to him, because they didn’t apply to just any patient—it was his daughter. His daughter, who was still so small, the breathing tube looked like a doll’s accessory. His daughter, who was beautiful and perfect and entirely theirs, laying in the NICU where they couldn’t reach her. So the hours became uncountable, beyond tracking and compiling; the days slid into each other and the nights seemed endless. He and Ashley handled it differently. She got a cluster of poppies tattooed on her arm and organized the family, negotiating the delivery of meals, the raising of funds, the rotation of faceless doctors. Eli didn’t sleep and never left the hospital.
And then he ran into an old patient of his outside the NICU. Or rather, she ran into him. She’d come up in a wheelchair and started talking to him, even though the unspoken rule of NICU parents was just that…not speaking. Not in front of the bassinets, at least. He hadn’t recognized Darla then, but she hadn’t minded, and sat there with her yellowed skin and wrinkly hands folded in her lap, talking about the tragedy of it all as if it were easy. And it had been easy, in a way, to talk to her. For weeks, Eli found himself pouring his heart out to a stranger, and she’d filled it right back up. It even made it easier to finally talk to Ashley. They learned she thought him useless for not doing anything, and he thought her heartless for not sitting with their daughter. The hospital’s counselor assured them this was normal.
Two months later, Poppy pulled through her four surgeries and got to come home. Darla and her husband—not longer friends, but strangers—were among the first to hold her in the living room. It should have all been perfect, the countless hours of the hospital behind them, but of course, it wasn’t.
Eli’s phone rang. He dried his hands and turned his back on the sink.
“Everything alright?” he asked Ashley.
“We have to go to the hospital,” she said immediately.
His heart landed somewhere between his feet. “What? Is Poppy—”
“She’s fine, love, I’m sorry, I swear she’s fine. It’s not that.”
“Well,” he said, his heart firmly back in his chest, “then we should be fine. My transfer paperwork was approved last week, so—”
“It’s Darla.”
Ashley and Poppy, along with Darla’s husband, sister, and best friend, were already in her room by the time he got there. There was a certain seriousness, but Darla’s sister was hanging up hospital-approved curtains, her best friend had arranged the go-bag and decorations, and her husband was seated right by her, holding her hand. As he walked in, Ashley laughed at something Darla said. Ashley wasn’t the kind of woman to laugh easily, but that was Darla, lighting up a room. She looked tired, and the nurse typing away on a tablet wore a frown, but she was still making Ashley laugh.
Poppy saw Eli and squealed, reaching over. She was eight months now, and getting bigger. Ashley handed her over.
“What’s wrong?” Eli asked.
Darla sighed and leaned back. “There’s another infection,” she said. Her husband patted her hand. “We’re running out of antibiotics to try. Lila here thinks this might be the end of the road.”
The nurse looked up and gave Darla a sad smile. “You’ve been fighting pretty hard, but we’re going to wait for what the doctor says.”
“Can I look at her chart?” Eli asked. Darla nodded, so Lila handed it over. As Eli read, he realized they didn’t need the doctor to confirm it. Darla’s body was finally shutting down. It seemed so unfair. They’d just become friends—more than that, really. How many times in his years as a nurse had Eli seen people who didn’t deserve pain die, while others full of hate or anger lived and thrived? Darla had so much love in her. It wasn’t fair.
Eli knelt down by Darla’s bed. Poppy reached over with baby fingers but couldn’t get to the old woman.
“It’s not fair,” Eli said.
“God never said life would be fair,” she replied. “In fact, how terrible would it be, to have a god who was fair instead of good?”
He didn’t understand—he would take fair over good any day, because then he wouldn’t be losing Darla.
“You just…you have so much love in you,” he said. “I don’t want this to be goodbye.”
“Then how about ‘see you later?’” Darla quipped. Her husband brushed a tear from his cheek. Right then, the doctor came in and asked everyone but the couple to leave. In the hallway, Ashley was already making plans—would there be a need for hospice? Who would visit on which days? Did the family need any money? These were questions that needed to be asked, Eli had learned, but in that moment, he was trying to hold onto the love and contentment that Darla seemed to carry with her everywhere.
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About the author
Spring Church member, Emma McCoy (M.A.), has two poetry books: This Voice Has an Echo (2024) and In Case I Live Forever (2022). She’s been published in places like Across the Margin, Stirring Literary, and Thimble Mag. She reads for Chestnut Review and Whale Road Review. She’s probably working on her novel right now. Catch her on Substack: https://poetrybyemma.substack.com/