Can I List God as an Emergency Contact?

I ask this in all seriousness.  This week I am facing a seventh (yes, seventh) surgery on a knee that has been banged up since the mid-90’s, leading to a total knee replacement 4 months ago which was to have hopefully been my final surgery.  However, it was not to be.  This surgery is to repair a nearly completely torn quadriceps- an injury that likely began with a small tear soon after surgery and grew without being detected while I pushed through my recommended rehab despite pain.  I have suspected that my pain and healing course has not been normal from the beginning, and as a Physical Therapist with over 30 years of clinical experience and good body awareness I have pretty good instincts. I am thankful that the tear was finally diagnosed after months of voicing my suspicions, but I’m also quite concerned that after this length of time I might be facing extensive damage and permanent deficits.  Hopefully not. But the weight of something potentially going wrong does weigh on me more heavily now than it has in the past as the damage looks pretty significant on the imaging. 

In this season, I also am facing a new and beautiful life alone after a traumatic, scary and prolonged betrayal by my now ex-husband and two of my closest friends of over 40 years.  In the same period, both of my parents both passed away, leaving me feeling like a lone boat in the ocean desperately seeking a safe island with no map.  I have had to do a massive overhaul of my internal world and the people I surround myself with, and though my trust was badly shaken by the last two years of my life, I have a full network of friends and family who love me and treat me with kindness and selflessness. The circle I have in place I know without a doubt has my best interests at heart and are filling my post-surgery schedule with every kind of help imaginable. 

But what I don’t have is an emergency contact that I don’t feel awkward asking for.  That person that is automatically in place on all my legal paperwork. 

I have a brother I'd call first, but he's carrying his own weight right now. I have family nearby, but the relationship requires a carefulness that doesn't mix well with crisis. I have wonderful local friends who have proven themselves through fire, who I trust deeply, and my life feels genuinely full. But I have no one for whom being listed feels uncomplicated in a life or death situation. This is the only thing that truly saddens me about no longer being married — I no longer have that one person whose name on the form just makes sense. And if I'm honest, I'm not sure I ever really had it. The name I would have written without hesitation turns out to have been someone I shouldn't have trusted with that weight at all — I just didn't know it yet. There's a particular kind of starting-from-nothing that comes not from losing something real, but from discovering it was never quite what you thought it was.

Would it be looked at funny if I were to list God as my emergency contact?  I don’t have his address or phone number, but everything else makes sense.  I’ve not been an overly outwardly religious person, more of a quietly consistent one.  In the last two years, I’ve called on God more for help and trust that I ever did before – mainly because of that solo boat feeling of not knowing where else to go with the deep stuff. 

And I've found, perhaps surprisingly, that He has been reliable. Not in the way of burning bushes or dramatic rescues, but in the quieter way of a door opening when I was sure I was sealed in a room. In the way of a friend texting at the exact moment I was sitting with something too heavy to carry alone. In the way of my own body, as battered as it has been, continuing to fight for me even when I wasn't sure I had enough fight left.

So while the hospital paperwork will need an actual human name with an actual phone number, I've been sitting with the more honest question underneath the practical one: what does it mean to not have that person anymore?

Because it isn't really about the form. It's about what the form represents — the assumption, hard-wired into every intake form and surgical consent packet, that adults come in pairs. That someone is always on the other end of the line who is both willing and equipped to speak for you when you cannot speak for yourself. The form doesn't have a box for it's complicated, or the person I would have listed made choices that disqualified him, or I am rebuilding and the scaffolding is real and sturdy but not yet load-bearing in this particular way.

I want to be clear about something, because I think this matters: I am not alone. I want to say that again because it's true and because loneliness and this particular kind of aloneness are not the same thing. I have people. Good, authentic people who care about me. People who have shown up with food and humor and the kind of steady presence that shows up most in hard seasons. What I am missing is not love or support or even presence. What I am missing is a person for whom being listed is uncomplicated. Someone who wouldn't be burdened by it. Someone who holds the role easily because the role fits naturally, the way a next of kin used to fit.

Betrayal has a long and lingering administrative tail. That is something no one tells you. Long after the acute pain has softened and you've done the work and rebuilt yourself into someone you actually recognize and respect — you are still, years later, updating forms. I am frequently finding the occasional name and address change that needs to be made that I previously missed.  I recently had a package misdelivered to the old house.  I still find myself realigning structures that were built around a life that no longer exists. Finding odd, procedural little reminders that things are different now.

This surgery has handed me one of those reminders.

And I'm choosing to hold it as information rather than evidence of lack. I don't have a perfect emergency contact. What I have is a God I've learned to trust in the dark, a circle of people who have proven themselves in fire, and a self who has — despite everything — remained her own reliable witness. That turns out to be more than enough to walk into a surgical suite with.

It just doesn't fit neatly in the box on the form.