Two Days

Two Days in the life of a minister.

Day One: I was at my home relaxing for the evening when one of our church members who was a labor and delivery nurse gave me a call. Something had gone very wrong with a delivery and they needed a pastor. I went to the hospital as quickly as I could.

When I arrived I was escorted into the room. There, in the little plastic post-delivery bed was a baby. She had a head full of dark curly hair and beautiful brown skin. She was a perfect little child. It was only when I touched her little face that I could believe it. She had died in delivery. There was no reason for it. The baby was fine before labor. The pregnancy was normal. Labor was normal. Delivery was normal. The baby just died.

I tried to speak some words of comfort to the family. It was astonishing how feeble my words felt. I talked with them. We prayed. I prepared to leave. They asked, “Will you baptize her?” I am Baptist, so baptizing babies was not something I was accustomed to doing. In my compassion for the family, I mustered the courage to baptize the child. “. . . In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost” I said as I made the sign of the cross in water on her perfect little forehead.

Day Two: One of my friends in town called me. She was close to one of the members of my church. An ambulance had come to the home of my church member’s son, she thought I needed to know. I went over immediately. It was the most terrible of scenes. The young man had killed himself. The police would not let anyone in the home. They informed me that the scene inside the home was disturbing and that the mother did not need to see what they had found.

They wanted me to help keep her out of the home. I said to her, “Let’s just let the police do their jobs.” That kept her at bay, at least momentarily. After a few minutes, letting the police do their jobs was not enough. She wanted to see her son.

Then I saw something out of the corner of my eye. The police were getting ready to come out of the house with the body. I reasoned that no mother should ever see her son in a body bag being wheeled out of a house on a stretcher. So, I positioned myself so that I was blocking her line of sight to the front door.

Epilogue: These were two days of my ministry out of over 7,000 of them. They were not consecutive days. In fact, there were years between them. Very few days have been anything like those two, thankfully. But on those days, I was grateful that God had called me to serve Him. I was honored to represent the presence of Christ for those families. When I look back at those days, I know there is nothing more important than a life lived in the service of Christ.