“Hal, when you meet someone, treat them as if they were in serious trouble, and you will be right more than half the time” ("Try, Try, Try," October 2018 GC), President Eyring's branch president had told him once. "He was too low" He'd later learn.
I don't know any place those particular odds feel higher than here in this hospital. My 9 month-old split-room neighbor - here day after day after day all alone... The young couple in the next room over, fresh, new and full of life, awaiting with medical certainty the end of their baby girl's fight. The family celebrating hospital day 23 - and the second time their now teenage boy would learn to speak his first word. The crouched woman weeping openly in the hallway, or the fast walking man in another hallway desperately trying not to - they've all got stories. Hopeful, heavy, raw, and real.
The staff too. If you ask, you'll find out that most of them came to this line of work because of some deeply impressed family or personal trauma. Now they are here doing what they can to alleviate the pain of others - even if their own still steals sleep from them during their off-duty hours.
"He was a man of sorrows," Isaiah wrote, "and acquainted with grief... our griefs and ..our sorrows" (53:3-5)
And while Isaiah writes of how we hide our faces from and despise Him for this - He bore it all so that He might come closer to us then - closer.
So what of our proximity to others during such times - how do we treat them as if they are in serious trouble? We must love them, see them, and hear them in the name of Him who - instead of just walking a mile in their shoes - would remove them to wash their feet.
With these thoughts brewing I offered to make breakfast for a father and son this morning in the family room area. They graciously accepted and I toiled away at the stove as they sat together at a table. A few moments later I turned at the sound of heavy coughing to see a slight foreign woman who had come to their side. "Thank you for saving my dad's life" the 10 year old boy said to her. While I don't really fauly myself for paying attention to what was on the stove, it is true that to meet the real needs of the people around me maybe I need to give more attention to opening my eyes.
Can you imagine the delight of our Heavenly Father to both hear and answer the prayer of one of His children to be able to see needs in others of His children so that they might help? He'll help us see their shoes.
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