Death, Where is Your Sting?

        Day after day I enter the rooms of men and women who have beating hearts and breathing lungs but are little more than warm corpses waiting for the end.  Their faces lined with anguish, mouths agape in a silent cry, hands bound in a last resort to keep them from hurting themselves.  These hands that were once warm and strong, eager to serve, work, create, and comfort are now only useful for drawing blood and measuring pulses.  Their blank eyes are shuttered windows hiding a retreated soul.  My job is to offer comfort to those whom comfort is a far-off memory, to apply feeble treatments for the onslaught of diseases ravaging their body, and to walk away from their rooms without becoming a shuttered house myself.  I can hear in the lunchtime small talk that my colleagues share my struggle to remain soft-hearted yet competent, compassionate yet harshly realistic, a healthcare provider yet a fellow human being.  As I listen to the other PA's share their anecdotes, most of them funny and sad at the same time, I realize that we're all just trying to cope with the death in our jobs.  Some by laughing, others blame the nurses/doctors/family members, while most of us just comfort ourselves with the thought that everyone dies someday and we were merely spectators to the inevitable.

        I've never had much experience with death before this past year.  It was something that happened to people in places far from all I know.  I don't live in fear of losing my life or family to war, famine and disease.  I've always known in my mind that Jesus conquered death on the cross, and we are free from the curse of death's finality and judgement.  For us, death is but a passage from this painfully beautiful life into a gloriously perfect one.  However, the power of the statement "death has been beaten" had never struck me as strongly as it is now beginning to.  It's hard to declare freedom from a fear you've never truly had.  But now as I see the grief, the regret, the paralyzing fear of the unknown afterlife that sinks into patients and family members alike, I begin to appreciate just how powerful that statement can be.  

       It's still difficult for me to shake off the weariness in my heart when I leave the hospital after a particularly trying day, and I haven't even experienced some of the terrible things my other colleagues have recounted to me.  But there's a strange and wonderful peace that arises from knowing that even in the face of darkness and death, it cannot touch us.  We may lose everything else that this world offers up to us as valuable, but the one thing they cannot give us we will never lose: life eternal in perfect communion with the God of goodness and light.  My prayer now is that I would be given the honor of displaying and offering this truth to all I encounter, especially the beautiful souls whom are closest to death.