Putting others' needs first has healing effect

A few years ago, I was making my daily rounds as a chaplain in a Sacramento hospital when I met an alert, and very friendly, octogenarian.

His present situation wasn't serious, but he was nearing 90 years old, so the likelihood of a "heavenly discharge" was becoming more likely with each passing year. With a balding head and a small frame, he had a Gandhi look about him and maybe even a touch of Gandhi's spirit.

At the end of our visit, I offered the aging Episcopalian a prayer for himself and his family. After my prayer, he offered me something that I've never forgotten.

"Does anyone ever offer to pray for you, chaplain?" His question, rare for a patient, told me he was looking outside himself at a time when most patients look, understandably so, inside themselves.

"Well, uh …" I stumbled, embarrassed that his attention was on my needs, "Occasionally."

"But have you ever had a patient pray for you?" he asked specifically.

"I guess not," I told him in a tone that may have implied I don't need prayer.

"Then it's about time, don't you think?" he declared with a wink in his voice.

Perhaps he recognized that from my position as a pastoral caregiver, I had come to imagine myself above receiving pastoral care from others. Perhaps, he saw an attitude in me that said, "I'm here to help people, but I don't need any help."

As he prayed for my work, my family and my health, I recalled the words of an old spiritual, "It's not my brother, it's not my sister, but it's me, O' Lord, standing in the need of prayer." His prayerful plea multiplied my efforts to pay the blessings forward to the remaining patients on my rounds.

This past month, I witnessed a similar incident when I saw my best friend, Roger Williams, pray for someone. Like me, Roger is a hospital chaplain, but he is also a third-time cancer patient being treated at the hospital where he's employed.
During a return visit to the hospital, he stopped a fellow employee to ask him how he was doing. His seemingly casual question had real purpose. The employee had lost a family member to a violent crime a few years back, and the subsequent trial was sensationalized by every news agency from here to Tajikistan

I don't believe the man realized how recent Roger's surgery was, since Roger's new incision was made over his old incision scar. Now, you should know that it's at this point I would have probably started talking about my own misfortune.

Not Roger. Roger promised the man with a calming reassurance that he was praying for him often. The employee heard Roger, heard his heart and heard his intent. Like the octogenarian, Roger deflated his own needs and deferred to the needs of another.

In his question to the man, Roger knew that God's economy doesn't work like ours. Jesus said it best when he said, "If your first concern is to look after yourself, you'll never find yourself. But if you forget about yourself and look to me, you'll find both yourself and me."

My friend and the octogenarian found that while facing their own mortality, other people mattered even more. And most importantly, they learned that the prayers they offered to others could boomerang and become a part of their own healing.

Chaplain Norris Burkes: Close encounters of the faith kind

This past month, while looking for a car for my college daughter, I responded to a craigslist ad. A few moments later, the buyer sent an enthusiastic reply, expressing with certainty that God wanted me to have her car.

Her assumption that I'd be interested in what she was selling sounded much like what I heard from another salesman a few days earlier after I'd finished my daily neighborhood jog.

During the cool-down portion of my jog, I heard a voice behind me asking, "How are you?" I turned toward the inquisitor to see two collegiate men dressed in starched white shirts, their dark neckties dangling over the handlebars of their carefully balanced bicycles. Their cherub faces suggested a relationship with a church that bestows the title of Elder for their young missionaries.

"Fine," I told them with a touch of huff.

After a few more salutatory comments, they asked me if I'd be willing to read some of their literature.

I recognized the ecclesiastical bravado from my younger days when I helped to conduct "community surveys." Knocking on doors in pairs, we presented a loaded question to anyone answering the door: "If you were to die tonight, do you know where you'd spend eternity?"

Like the young missionaries, and much like a timeshare salesman, our training gave us a veritable flowchart of canned responses. If the resident wasn't sure of their eternal destination, we'd ask them, "Would you like to be sure?" The narrative was designed to drive the dazed respondent to recite a canned prayer — much like a theological swearing-in ceremony — that promised celestial assurance, holding full privileges thereof.

Now these years later, I was on the receiving end of this same ecclesiastical entrapment. I knew I'd been cornered. If I told them to get lost, they'd have proof that my faith was heartless. If I listened to them, they'd be unduly encouraged.

Caught between my desire to be gracious and their need to add another convert, I tried to make some friendly small talk about where they were from and how long they would be in Sacramento. They weren't budging.

"Can we come to your house to study the Bible?" asked the one from Australia.

My reply was a more direct approach because sometimes you have to just tell people, "I'm not buying what you are selling."

"Look" I said, "It sounds like we are both perfectly content with our individual faiths, so I hope you can respect that and pick another subject."

The Pacific Islander then fired their most loaded question.

"If we could show you another way, would you pray for God to reveal it was right?" Their question led me to believe that they were undoubtedly sure that in this game of mystical roulette, they had the lucky number.

The truth is faith needn't be a roulette game or even a potluck supper for that matter. When people of faith earnestly search, most will find a specific path that puts them in touch with their creator and helps them to live out ethical lives. I'm sure this was true for these young men, but at the end of the day, God isn't in anyone's pocket. He simply doesn't limit his appearances to necktied bicyclists nor is God a used car salesman.

By the way, the woman trying to sell me the car found another buyer when I hinted that God might be happier if I could get the car for a lower price. As for my daughter, she's still afoot — which has led to some interesting encounters with two bicyclists of her age wanting to study the Bible.

Norris Burkes is a syndicated columnist, national speaker and author of No Small Miracles. He also serves as an Air National Guard chaplain and is board-certified in the Association of Professional Chaplains. You can call him at 321-549-2500, email him at ask@thechaplain.net, visit his website thechaplain.net or write him at P.O. Box 247, Elk Grove, CA 95759.

Lifetime can last only a moment

Whatever you think of Republican presidential candidate, Rick Santorum, you might want to say a prayer for his 3-year-old daughter, Isabella, who was admitted to the hospital last month with complications from a chromosomal condition called Trisomy 18.

What little I know about Trisomy 18 I learned during an encounter with Sue and Mike Reed in 2004 while I was a chaplain for Sutter Memorial Hospital in Sacramento, Calif.

It was there I learned that Trisomy 18 is caused by extra material from chromosome 18. It's three times more common in girls than boys. Half of the babies don't survive their birth week while the remaining half experience serious developmental problems.

Sue and Mike learned about the deformity when Sue was 44 years old and pregnant with her second child. Because older mothers carry a greater risk of genetic deformities, Sue's doctors scheduled genetic testing. When results showed they had a girl, they named her Gabriella Grace — or "Gi-Gi" for short.

A week after a genetic test, Sue recalls waking with a feeling that "something's not OK." That afternoon, a doctor told the couple there was a 95 percent certainty that Gi-Gi had Trisomy 18 and that most women terminate these pregnancies.

Since Sue had an abortion as a teenager, she decided that she "…wouldn't do it again. "I knew in my heart of hearts that God made Gi-Gi exactly as intended because Scripture says, 'Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you. Before you were born, I set you apart.' "

Sue believed, "God was asking me to honor this life. She was our daughter with a bad diagnosis, but the diagnosis was secondary. Still, with each doctor's visit, I was sure Gi-Gi wouldn't have a heartbeat."

But as their daughter's heart continued to beat, Sue and Mike planned for a live birth, asking that Gi-Gi be given only comfort care and then allowed a natural death. "We just want to meet her and love her," they told the doctors, "for as long as she is going to be with us."

The night before, Sue wrote a letter to Gi-Gi telling her, "Some people only dream of angels, but I get to actually give birth to one and then hold her in my arms. I am so very blessed. See you tomorrow, sweet girl."

So, at 10 a.m. Feb. 5, 2004, I entered labor and delivery to find Mike and Sue with the video camera most expectant parents happily carry. Only their video recorder would record the two most sacred moments of all — birth and death.

"I expected a deformed baby," Sue admitted, "but she was beautiful. It was like a visitor from heaven. … It was like God showing me that what we did was the 'faith thing.' I remember feeling like my heart was exploding so joyfully. It was like seeing God on Earth.

"It struck home that God hears, sees, and answers prayers. Even though I'd wished for a better outcome, I'm grateful that God chose us. I never thought I could walk through something like this. It's made me realize how every moment in life is important — even if it was just 80 minutes. I packed a lot of parenthood in those 80 minutes."

"Sometimes, we only get a moment," Sue said. "GiGi's life was that moment."
Norris Burkes is a syndicated columnist, national speaker and author of "No Small Miracles." He also serves as an Air National Guard chaplain and is board-certified in the Association of Professional Chaplains. You can call him at 321-549-2500, email him at ask@thechaplain.net, visit his website thechaplain.net or write him at P.O. Box 247, Elk Grove, CA 95759.