One day I had a call from the maternity ward to say a patient wanted to see a chaplain. We do not have many requests from the maternity ward so I was intrigued. I was wondering if I was going to get to bless a living baby for a change.
In fact it turned out to be a very different scenario. The patient’s brother had been murdered. The funeral was going to happen the next day and due to the patient having an emergency caesarean section she was going to miss the service. She felt devastated about her brother’s death, extremely sad at missing the funeral yet she also had the joy of cradling her baby daughter.
The next day, at the time of the funeral, I went and said some prayers with her and a friend who was supporting her. I showed them a picture of a candle I had lit in the chapel with the brother’s name on a card in front of it. They took some comfort from this.
It’s hard to face these awful situations. Sometimes I feel so inadequate and I think who am I to try and make sense of it all? Like the bible says “I am who I am” and in my own limited way I am prepared to keep struggling and to stand alongside those who suffer. I don’t have all the answers but I can enable the questions. Sometimes it's about learning to live with those questions.
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