The Deacon's Bench - May, 2010

Part of the training for chaplains at Hartford Hospital involves 16-hour shifts on the weekends, once a month. For the entire double shift, you’re ‘it’ as far as chaplains go in this 800+ bed hospital.

You carry two pagers: one for the emergency room and another for the rest of the hospital. You can be, and are, called for anything from baptizing a baby with minutes to live and sharing its parents’ pain, to the neurotrauma unit where victims of sudden calamities are treated while their anxious families await news which is rarely good.

You never know what will happen next. The two pagers keep you from sleep, even when they’re silent. I feel like a coiled spring. With major differences, it is the closest thing to combat that I’ve experienced. Yes, we’re trained, but how does one prepare for anything, in the amazing variety of ways anything can occur?

As it turns out, there’s potential for growth in that tense space, depending on how we grapple with the challenge. Whenever I feel that it’s me that has to sort everything out and come up with the perfect response I find myself becoming anxious and prone to come up with exactly the opposite. When I let go and turn my entire presence over to God - everything I am, everything I think, feel and do – I become calm and the outcome is nothing short of astonishing.

Let me tell you a story about that. One evening, towards the end of a 16-hour shift that had already been filled with complex and draining situations, I was paged to spend time with a family whose mom was in the neurotrauma unit. She’d suffered a burst aneurysm, and a drain had been inserted through her skull to relieve the pressure on her brain. The outcome, as it typically is in this place, was uncertain.

As I walked to the family room I told God I was utterly out of energy and asked if He would do this one a capella; all I could supply was my body. I got the sense that was perfectly OK with Him.

I met the family and they were eager to say or do something for their mom. We prayed together for a bit, and then I asked if they would like to write down some thoughts or prayers for their mom, so that she could see later on what they were experiencing while she was in her coma. Don’t ask me where that thought came from.

They liked that idea. It gave them the sense they could do something rather than just sit there helplessly in their worry. So we wrote. Then I suggested a couple of us might be able to go in and read what we’d written to mom. Don’t ask me where that idea came from either.

They liked that too, so I checked with the nurses to see if we could visit mom. It was indeed OK, so we went in and gathered around mom’s bed. She had a big tube coming out of the top of her head, along with a meter that reported the pressure in her brain. We all touched her arms and legs and began to read the prayers.

As we prayed, the reading on the pressure meter went down. It wasn’t a cure - just a really good thing. It seemed to me that the silence of her coma, the silence of the intentions of our hearts, and the silence of the power of God were mixing together in that moment. Mom knew we were there. God knew we were there.

We finished and everyone left quietly – no one daring to speak. Don’t ask me what really happened in that room. I think you may already know.

Rarely is the news from the neurotrauma unit good, but sometimes it is. And sometimes it’s so good it’s almost, so to speak, beyond belief.