Dr. Luke’s shift at Jerusalem Hospital had fallen on a Sunday, which was rather unusual because his shifts rarely fell on Sundays, and on the few occasions when they did, he would simply make arrangements to attend their lunch-hour service on his off day and life would go on as usual. This particular Sunday, however, he had finished his rounds early, and with an hour or so to spare before he needed to attend to anything else, he decided to watch the live-streamed service from their church. He settled into his office, reached for the remote, and switched on the television, thinking that this was one of those small conveniences that made working on a Sunday a little less painful. As he settled down, though, another thought crossed his mind, and he wondered why he had to enjoy the service alone when there were patients lying in the general ward who might also appreciate a little fellowship. After all, they were not in a position to walk into the sanctuary, but the sanctuary could, at least, find its way to them through a television screen. He switched off the television in his office, picked up the remote, and made his way to the men’s general ward. He walked confidently tapping along the wall guards as his stethoscope swung left and right on his neck. This was a happy day.
Jerusalem Hospital was one of those national hospitals where the number of patients had long outgrown the space available for them, and the general ward had mastered the art of accommodating people in ways that would have made the original architect question several of his professional decisions. The beds stood in close rows, with just enough space between them for a nurse to squeeze through sideways and for a doctor to make his rounds without accidentally introducing himself to a patient’s drip stand. Some beds had been pushed closer to the walls. Forget one wall panel per bed. You wouldn’t even tell how many beds this ward was supposed to handle. Others had found themselves squeezed into corners that were probably never intended to accommodate a bed. The smell of disinfectant and antibiotics mingled with the heavier smell of sweat, body fluids, damp bed linen, and the unmistakable scent of a hospital that had been busy long before the sun came up. Somewhere, a patient was coughing persistently, a nurse was calling for someone to bring a file, and a trolley rattled past with the urgency of something that had been needed 30 minutes earlier. It was in the middle of all this that Dr. Luke arrived with the enthusiasm of a man who had just remembered that the good things of God were not reserved for those who could make it to church.
“Guys, today we are going to stream the service from our church,” he announced, and the response was surprisingly enthusiastic. A few patients adjusted themselves on their beds, one pulled his blanket closer, and another called out to someone at the far end to make sure they could see the screen. There was something about the announcement that gave the ward a little lift, because for a moment they were not merely patients waiting for test results, medication, and the next doctor’s review; they were people who could participate in something that mattered to them outside those hospital walls. Dr. Luke switched on the television, and as the 55 inch Tornado screen slowly came to life, you could almost see the anticipation on their faces. He navigated to YouTube and scrolled through the live streams that usually appeared on his feed, although he did not have to go very far because their church was consistently among the first three suggestions. He clicked on the all familiar logo, with its distinc red circle around it clearly marked “MAIN SERVICE,” and the sanctuary appeared on the screen, already alive with music and the familiar excitement of Sunday morning worship.
The music ministration was in high gear, and the choir was doing what choirs do when the congregation is sufficiently warmed up, racing and counter racing with the energy in the room, with the lead singer moving from one declaration to another, from one corner of the raised platform to the other, while the musicians kept the atmosphere going. Dr. Luke sat down on an empty chair near the wall, content that he had done something useful with his free hour, smiling like the head of medical services at Jerusalem Hospital on a good day. For a while everything seemed to be going well. Then, just as the music reached another high point, the choir leader suddenly stopped the singing and began addressing the congregation. He made a few declarations, encouraged the worshippers to give God praise, and then, with the confidence of someone who knew exactly what the Lord expected from everyone in the building, he asked them whether they could give better a shout to the Lord because that applause was definitley for the area Chief! Could they be excited to be in the house of the Lord that morning? Could they clap their hands and worship Him with the joy that He deserved? He paused briefly, allowing the congregation to respond, before introducing an illustration that he appeared to find particularly powerful.
“Imagine if you woke up this morning in a hospital bed. Would you still be worshipping the Lord the way you are worshipping Him now? Would you still be clapping your hands like you are clapping them now? There is somebody who wanted to be in the house of the Lord this morning, but they were not able to come. There is somebody who wanted to wake up this morning, but they did not wake up. There is somebody who wanted to come to church, but they are lying in a hospital bed instead. But you are here, and you are not clapping, you are gloomy, and you are looking as if somebody has taken away your joy. Can you give the Lord a shout like somebody who is healthy, somebody who is not sick, somebody who has every reason to praise Him?”
The congregation responded, and the choir leader continued, drawing more examples from the misfortunes that could have happened to the people in the sanctuary but had, thankfully, not happened to them. On the television screen, the rest of the singers were clapping, jumping, and shouting, while the choir leader kept reminding them that they had every reason to be grateful because they were not in hospital. In the men’s general ward, however, something quite different was happening. The patients who had been sitting up to watch the service began shifting uncomfortably in their beds. One looked away from the screen, another pulled his blanket over his legs, and a man who had been smiling when the television came on suddenly became very interested in the floor beside his bed. The room had not changed, the beds were still in their crowded arrangement, and the smell of antibiotics and disinfectant had not suddenly become worse, but the atmosphere had changed in a way that Dr. Luke could not ignore. He had brought the church to the hospital, only for the church to spend the next several minutes explaining to the hospital patients why the people in church ought to be happier that they were not where the patients were.
Dr. Luke began to feel the kind of discomfort that makes a man look around a room for an exit that was not there a moment earlier. He had spent days encouraging these very patients with the mercy of God, telling them about His love, reminding them that the Lord was able to heal them, and praying with them when their bodies were giving them more trouble than they knew how to explain. Yet here was their own church, beaming into the ward through a television screen, using their condition as an illustration to motivate people who were already healthy enough to be standing in a sanctuary. He wanted to reach into the nearest cupboard and somehow fit himself inside it, although the cupboard was probably too small even for his coat. He glanced at the patients, hoping that perhaps they were not paying much attention, but that was wishful thinking, because they were paying attention with the concentration of people who had suddenly discovered that the sermon illustration was about them.
One patient, who had been lying near the window, finally turned towards him and asked, “Doctor Luke, is it true that the Lord does not care about me because I am in hospital?” Dr. Luke opened his mouth, but before he could find an answer, another patient called out from the opposite side of the ward. “So, Doctor Luke, are you telling me that I am here because God did not want me to be healthy?” There was a brief silence, broken only by the distant sound of a trolley being pushed along the corridor and the continued music coming from the television. The music had taken another trajectory and the congregants had been taken on a tour of the carribean with some wonderful tropical beats praising and dancing in a Carribean way. Dr. Luke looked at the screen, then at the patients, and then back at the screen, as though the answer might appear somewhere between the choir leader’s microphone and the church logo. All he could manage was, “Guys, I can explain what he meant… I can explain.”
Unfortunately, the situation had moved beyond the stage at which explanations were likely to be received with much enthusiasm. A voice from one of the beds shouted, “Remove it!” Another patient joined in with a firm, “Weka highlights za ball!” and within seconds, the general ward had reached a unanimous decision that the service had run its course, & football highlights probably felt like a better option. Dr. Luke picked up the remote, switched off the television, and stood there for a moment, holding it in his hand as though it had personally betrayed him. He looked at the patients and quietly said, “I’m sorry, guys,” before walking back to his office, leaving behind a ward full of people who had come to watch a church service and had instead found themselves sitting through an explanation of why their suffering ought to make someone else grateful.
There was, however, one patient who had not joined the chorus of complaints, and if you had been watching him closely, you would have noticed that he had been smiling throughout the entire crucifiction of Dr. Luke. Terell was lying towards the corner of the ward, where his bed had been squeezed into a space that made it difficult to move around without disturbing the patient beside him. He had been admitted for a condition that the hospital staff had jokingly begun referring to as DJ although the joke had become less funny with every passing week. He was a believer, born and raised in church. He had been in hospital for nearly three months, and the doctors were still trying to establish why his condition kept recurring and changing. No sooner had they figured out what was ailing him, than the goal post shifted. It is like the condition was conceived in the head. Nurses would change shift and walkin shouting “DJ Leo tunatibu nini?” Every time he appeared to be recovering, something would happen, his condition would deteriorate, and he would find himself back in the same bed, undergoing more tests and waiting for another explanation. The nurses knew him, the doctors knew him, and some of the other patients had been moved in and out of the ward so often that he had become one of the familiar faces in the place. Yet, even with all that had happened to him, he had been smiling while the others were growing increasingly uncomfortable with what they were hearing.
Terell’s smile had very little to do with the choir leader’s exhortations, and it had nothing to do with the fact that he was happy to be in hospital. He was definitely not happy to be sick, and he had certainly not spent three months in a hospital bed because he enjoyed the company of doctors, nurses, and the occasional laboratory technician who came to collect samples at hours when reasonable people were asleep. He was smiling because, somewhere in the middle of that rather uncomfortable encounter, he had begun to understand something that he had not seen before, and the irony of it was that he had needed to be in a hospital ward to see it clearly.
Before his admission, he had been a committed church worker, the kind of man who took his ministry seriously and believed that whatever he did in the house of God ought to be done with conviction. He sang, prayed, served, and encouraged others to remain faithful, and he had never considered himself the sort of person who would deliberately set out to hurt anyone. But there had been a few things about his ministry that had drawn the attention of the church leadership. He had been told that he needed to reconsider some of his public utterances, and the manner in which he carried out certain services. At the time, he had interpreted the correction as an attempt to silence him. He had concluded that the authorities were against him, that they did not understand his calling, and that they were uncomfortable with the kind of ministry he was doing. He had even developed his own explanation for what was happening to him, and in his mind, the problem was not that he might have been doing something wrong but that the people in authority did not want him to continue doing what he believed God had called him to do. The more he pushed back, the more draining it got, the more he fought, the more he lost.
That was how he had arrived at the conclusion that he was suffering from the good old church heart*, but no doctor would get the proper medication for it. It morphed and shifted like the spirit it was. So when it was captured as the occassional diarrhea, just as it was clearing up and Terell, was to be discharged, sores would appear in his mouth and the diagnosis would shift to foot & mouth, as it was about to clear a few weeks later, migrains would take over… and for a while he had carried the grievance with him, convinced that what he was going through was an attack of the enemy. He was sure this was evidence that somebody was trying to frustrate his ministry. But now, as he lay in the crowded ward watching the other patients react to the choir leader’s words, something began to fall into place. He remembered the many times he had stood before people and told them to thank God because they did not have broken bones, because they could see, because they could walk, and because they were healthy enough to serve the Lord. He remembered the way he had used the suffering of others to encourage those who were doing well, believing that he was giving them a reason to be grateful. He had never stopped to consider what those same words sounded like to the people who were lying in hospital beds, the people who could not see, the people whose bodies had failed them, and the people who had prayed for healing until they no longer knew what else to say. People who worshiped the Lord their condition notwithstanding. He had thought that he was encouraging the healthy, but he had not considered whether, in the process, he was making the sick feel as though their suffering was evidence that they had somehow fallen short of God’s favour.
And there he was, lying in a hospital bed, listening to another person do exactly what he had been doing, only this time he could see the effect of the words on the faces of the people around him. He could see how an illustration that sounded perfectly logical in the sanctuary could become a burden when it was delivered to someone who was already struggling. He could see how a statement that appeared deeply spiritual to the person making it could leave another person wondering whether God had abandoned them. He could see how, in an attempt to inspire one group of people, a minister could unintentionally wound another group, and how the very people who needed comfort could become the unwitting props in somebody else’s lesson about gratitude. It was not that people in church should stop thanking God for their health, nor was it that believers should be discouraged from celebrating the goodness of God when things were going well. It was that there was a difference between thanking God for one’s own blessings and using another person’s pain as a reason why everyone else ought to be happy.
For the first time, he began to wonder whether the people who had corrected him had been trying to do him a favour. Perhaps they had not been against his ministry after all. Perhaps they had seen something in his words and actions that he had been too occupied with his own convictions to notice. Perhaps the problem was not that they did not want him to serve God, but that they wanted him to learn how to serve God without hurting the very people he was supposed to minister to. He had interpreted their correction as an attack on his calling when it might actually have been an attempt to protect it. He had called it church heart because he believed the church had wounded him, but lying in that hospital bed, he was beginning to understand that some of the things he had considered wounds inflicted on him were actually corrections intended to keep him from inflicting wounds on others. The very thorns through which our flesh is kept in check…
He continued smiling, not because he had suddenly found an explanation for his illness, and certainly not because the hospital had discovered a new treatment for his condition, but because he had finally begun to understand the lesson that had eluded him for so long. He could not yet say whether the doctors would find a solution to his physical condition, but he was beginning to see that there was another kind of healing he needed, one that had very little to do with the medication he was receiving and everything to do with the way he understood his ministry. The reality of the spirituality of life hit him. For months, he had been looking at the people who corrected him as though they were the source of his problem, and now he was beginning to consider that they might have been pointing him towards a problem he could not see for himself. The irony was not lost on him. He had spent so much time defending himself against what he believed was an attack on his ministry that he had never stopped to ask whether his ministry itself needed some attention.
Meanwhile, Dr. Luke had returned to his office and sat down behind his desk, but the peace he had been looking forward to enjoying after his rounds had disappeared. He rested his chin on his hands and stared at the desk, replaying the events of the last few minutes in his mind. He tried to pray but nothing would come from his mouth. He had always known that words mattered, especially when they came from a pulpit, but he had never quite considered how easily words intended to inspire could become words that wounded. He thought about the patients he had been encouraging, the prayers he had made with them, and the assurances he had given them about the love and mercy of God. He wondered how many times he had heard a sermon and agreed with it because it sounded biblical, without pausing to consider how it might be received by someone whose circumstances were entirely different from his own. He wondered how many times a minister had spoken confidently about faith, healing, gratitude, or victory without thinking about the person in the congregation who had been praying for the same thing for years and had not yet seen an answer.
It troubled him that the words could be so familiar, so well delivered, and so spiritually convincing, yet still leave someone feeling as though they had been forgotten by God. He had seen the choir leader’s enthusiasm, heard the congregation respond, and understood the point she was trying to make. He could even imagine that many of the people in the sanctuary had been genuinely encouraged by what she said. But he could not ignore the fact that, in the process of encouraging one group, the message had turned the suffering of another group into a lesson about how fortunate the healthy were. And now he was left wondering how often the church had done this without noticing, how many people had walked into a sanctuary carrying burdens they could barely explain, only to hear words that made those burdens heavier, and how many had quietly left believing that their struggles placed them on the wrong side of God’s goodness.
He had not finished thinking about it when the alarm console on the nursing station broke the silence in the wards. The monitor indicated that the alert was coming from Terell’s corner, the same man who had been smiling throughout the entire drama. Dr. Luke rose immediately and hurried back to the ward, where the familiar sounds of hospital activity had resumed, with a nurse calling for assistance in the distance, he remembered the television, the choir leader, the patients who had shouted for him to switch it off, and the man who had smiled while everyone else was uncomfortable… Whose alarm was now unsettling the peace of the men’s ward…