I had known Luke for almost two years. He was a young man in his early twenties who struggled with cystic fibrosis. Hard hit by the disease, Luke spent most of the last 18 months of his life in the hospital. I was the chaplain assigned to his care unit. It was hard to watch him as the disease progressed slowly to its inevitable conclusion. Luke was near the end of his life when I sat with him in silence one night. Because breathing was so difficult, small talk was not diverting, it was painful. Luke found it comforting to have someone who cared about him sit quietly nearby.
I spent a lot of time watching death that year. My experiences had left me with a strong sense of suffering and loss. By comparison, my knowledge of resurrection and hope was pretty thin and unsustaining. I prayed about it often. My hours of prayer and searching had been distilled into a simple prayer I repeated often during my day, “Lord, let me see your hand in all of this.”
The disease had damaged Luke’s lungs so badly that he was unable to get much value out of a breath of air. By this point, the level of carbon dioxide in his body was unbelievably high. Theeffectit had on Luke was a high level of confusion and splitting headaches. He was rarely lucid enough to communicate well and he was very, very weak. Luke had found that he was somewhat more comfortable if he could sit up in bed, draped forward over the hospital bed tray. Every now and then he would sit straight up and try to catch his breath. When he did so he would teeter and wobble dangerously like an infant just learning to sit up. It got so bad that I was concerned he would fall sideways out of the bed. Sitting in a chair next to him, I put out my hand to steady him once or twice. Finally, he sat up and started to fall sideways away from me.
Two things happened at once.
First, I sprang up and caught him with my arm around his shoulder pulling him back up until he was leaning against me.
Thesecond thing I remember was that I was so overwhelmed with sorrow for my friend that I instinctively prayed the prayer I had been praying for weeks, “Lord, let me see your hand in all of this.”
As I stood and prayed this prayer, my eyes looked over Luke’s head to see my own hand holding tightly on to his shoulder. As a matter of fact, my eyes focused on my hand at the very moment I prayed “let me see your hand.” It was as if there was a spotlight on it.
For that brief moment and for that singular purpose my hand was
God’s hand.
I am not
saying that I am the hand of God. What’s more, I am not proud of all the other uses I have made of that same hand before or since that moment. But then and there, for Luke’s comfort and my own, my hand became God’s hand. It was not just a moment of comfort to a dying friend. It had become “holy ground.”
All three of us, God, Luke and myself were met and held together in love. Themoment passed as quickly as it came, but not without creating profound encouragement and wonder in my heart.
Just hours before his arrest at Gethsemane, Jesus said, “This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.”
In acts of love, God meets with us, bringing his own comfort, healing and most of all Grace to that meeting. That moment with Luke and God didn’t reduce my sorrow but it truly did increase my sense of peace and hope. It promised a greater healing.
Jesus also said, “I am the resurrection and the life; he who believes in Me will live even if he dies, and everyone who lives and believes in Me will never die. Do you believe this?”
I do.
Each month a member of the
Cook County Ministerium will
offer Spiritual Reflections. For
April, our contributor is Pastor
Dave Harvey, who has served
as pastor of Grand Marais
Evangelical Free Church since
February of 2008.
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