A white coat with a gold cross does not a chaplain make.

"Consecrate yourselves, for tomorrow the Lord will do amazing things among you” (Joshua 3:5)

How many times do I go to sleep thinking these words spoken by Joshua to the people? Not many. And yet I do believe that God can and does do amazing things...most of the time I am not cognizant of His activity. Well, today I think that I am. I believe that all summer, from the beginning of June until now, God has been doing amazing things among us. And I say, "us," because I have been working alongside an "us" for the past twelve weeks at an urban hospital that provides medical, surgical and emergency care fulfilling my C.P.E. requirements as the final part of my MDiv degree at North Park Theological Seminary. For those who are not familiar with the acronyms in Seminary, C.P.E. is Clinical Pastoral Education and in order to graduate from North Park, the MDiv students must complete at least six credits of C.P.E. For me, that meant walking the hallways of the hospital from June until the middle of August.

I am not kidding when I say that I felt slightly sick at the thought of spending that amount of time in a hospital and given the choice, I had no wish to do so. But I had no choice in whether or not my wishes mattered as I had to fulfill the requirements of the call. I have heard the stories from those who have gone before me in this call:

• all my issues will surface and will get in the way of "being" with patients
  
• I will spend considerable amounts of time wrestling with difficult situations
• I will be forced to reconsider what is allowed in a human life (i.e. various views on whether or not God was responsible)
• I will have to consider how unfair life or that my theology of human suffering does not even come close to the reality of the actuality which happens in families who are as broken and wretched as we are but have to admit it because they are lying in a shapeless green gown upon a hospital bed wondering what they did to deserve their lot.

However my experience in walking the floors of the hospital did not match my feared assumptions. In fact the past twelve weeks have been some of the most transformational weeks of my seminary life. I have told close friends that I believe that God gave me a "gracious" time while in the hospital. By that I mean that some of the things I was most dreading facing did not ask for my attention. I am certain and sure that had I had to be with a family who were suffering the loss of a baby, young child or fetal demise (natural abortion) I would have been the one in need of pastoral care and so for reasons that God knows, I was not asked to be there for those distraught families (and these things happen with painful regular reality). My "hardest" night was my final night on call when I dealt with three deaths and while standing with the family who were learning of the sudden and dramatic death of their beloved 43 year old husband of one, father of two, and friend of many, another young man staggered through the emergency doors with 5 gun shots wounds to his body. While the Police and the hospital security dealt with the mayhem that erupted outside, trained surgeons and night staff crammed into ER3 to stabilize the 22 year old. I am not sure if he survived the night as he was transferred to a trauma hospital shortly after his arrival where he was first admitted.

What I did learn during my twelve weeks was that the most important thing we can offer to patients and their families is our time and attention; unlimited, unhurried, time. Some of my visits to the men and women who needed medical care were short and uneventful. Others called for extended visits and when family members and patients asked if they were taking up too much of my time I learned to use a phrase that I have heard from another pastor: "You are the most important thing I have going on today." I suppose most of us seldom hear this phrase as we live in a culture of constant busyness. No one seems to have time for anyone, least of all for people they don't even know. We hardly have time for those we already love and for whom we care let alone for those we have just met or are being paid to visit. (OK...during the summer I was not being paid a dime but imagine with me ...)

One of my colleagues shared with me during our five hour course evaluation that she was concerned that I was not going to make it through as the first thing we did during our orientation was to visit the morgue. She was right. I was a mess. In front of me was a big black bag with the curves and shape of a person who at one time must have been loved by someone.
As I moved to allow another to come into the chilly basement, I turned to look behind me and saw a small, red bag that looked no more than the size of a target grocery bag. It had the distinct shape of a human life - except that there was no life contained in that bag, only a few pounds of human remains that contained so much potential for growth and promise but was stopped too short. The cold of the room did not stop me from sensing that unless I hotfooted it out of the door pretty fast, I might end up lying on the floor instead of walking on it. My colleague was not the only one wondering if I was going to get through his hospital ordeal and be intact twelve weeks later.

I became acutely cognizant that every person I met in the hospital whether doctor or nurse, housekeeper or security guard, patient or staff member is a human being made in the image of God and is therefore fearfully and wonderfully made. Our bodies do not work as we desire they should, cells turn from healthy and normal to cancerous and abnormal, bones get broken, hearts stop, organs get overloaded and quit functioning, and we forget that we are fragile and in need of healing. Then there is a soul that seems not to get a look in though as seminary students we are reminded that we are really souls with a body rather than bodies with a soul.

Early on in my time there I was paged to the IMCU (Intermediate Care Unit) and upon entering the room I saw a man who was no more than 30 years old, writhing on the bed and moaning quietly. Earlier that day he had tried to take his life and had botched the job leaving a mess of a life lying in front of me. Beside him sat a young woman, a sitter, unknown to him whose eyes were mostly fixed on her phone which she was using possibly using to text her friends to establish evening plans. Occasionally she would look up at the T.V. above the bed and she did throw me a glace when I entered the room. "What happened?" I asked her. "He tried to kill himself and he missed," she replied, a wry smile crossing her face. Her attitude was not kind but to her, this young man was only that; some young man. As she returned her attention to her phone, I wanted to ask her more questions but she most likely would not have the answers. I wanted to ask her if she cared that this young man hated his life so much that he had tried to end it. I wanted to ask her if she would ever think of doing such a thing or had she ever thought about it. I wanted to ask him who would miss him if he had succeeded in his effort. I wanted to ask him about the woman who had given him birth, the brothers and sisters he may have had. I wanted to ask him if he knew that there was a God who loved him or a Jesus who died for him but all he did was continue to moan and writhe on the narrow hospital bed. His situation was desperate but he was one who helped me realize with astonishing clarity that every life is precious and mysterious and fearful and wonderful and we cannot ever take it for granted.