Observations From a Hospital

I wrote the following while on a 15 minute break at the hospital where I'm working as a chaplain. I was sitting outside on a veranda, overlooking the city, and the following just came to me.

"I saw the face of God today. She was a 97 year-old Chinese woman with stringy, greasy hair, who wanted to die. I can't tell you exactly how I know it was God, other than just a feeling I have. When everything else falls away--eating, drinking, hygiene, an urge to cling to life--when it falls away, it is much easier to identify God.

You know what the most spectacular thing was? God was in the room twice, as only God can be. God was in the daughter's eyes as well. The daughter who slowly fed her mother a bite at a time, who told me her mother fought the doctors tooth and nail, who smiled when she spoke of her mother's ability to taste a food once and know how to cook it--God was in her face, too.

God was also down the hall in the 87 year-old Russian Orthodox woman who couldn't speak, who labored through every breath, but whose breath calmed and slowed the longer I sat and looked at her.

Lest you think God only resides in women, I also glimpsed God in a 95 year-old, New York born, ballroom dancing Episcopalian. I never knew God meringued, but I can swear it's the truth.

Coming to San Francisco, there's a lot of people I expected to meet--new friends, fellow students, neighbors, perhaps even a local celebrity. What I wasn't expecting, however, was to see God on a ventilator, to see God with pancreatic cancer. Heck, I never even realized God got colds. Yet...yet...I can attest to it now.

I wonder where I'll find God tomorrow. On a stretcher in the hallway? In a nurse's uniform running from room to room? Next to a sea of rooftops, the adventure begins."