God Within

One late post-call morning when I was a family medicine resident I went to make sure all was well with a patient I’d admitted early that morning.  I don’t remember the details of her diagnosis or the reason I felt like I had to check on her, but I do remember that as I took my stethoscope out of my ears she smiled at me and said “Are you a Christian?”

This is not a question that I am frequently asked, and to be honest hearing it always makes me a bit uneasy.  It’s not the answer that concerns me: I know the answer.  It’s the followup questions that always seem to delve into deep theological issues best not discussed with strangers when you are going into thirty hours without sleep.  But I said that yes, I was, and quietly, fervently prayed that she would leave it at that.

“I knew it,” she said triumphantly.  “You have something about you.  I can always tell.” 

What do you say to a statement like that?  I said “Thank you,” and finished my exam, and told her I thought she’d feel better soon, and left. 

But things that people say to you when you're going on thirty hours without sleep sometimes have a direct line into your subconscious – and here I am, five or six years later, telling you about a momentary encounter when what I’m supposed to be doing is talking about finding God in other people.

Except that’s what I do every day.

Every time I walk into an exam room, or sit down at a hospital bedside, or huddle tightly with family members to speak in low tones, I am facing God in every person.  It’s not always an easy thing to remember – people get drunk, or angry, or belligerent, or apathetic; they drink too much and they don’t take their medications and they can’t figure out why they’re always so short of breath, but it can’t be those two packs of Marlboros I smoke a day, I smoke Lites. 

It’s easy to see God in newborn babies and happy parents.  It’s easy to see God in the toothless and gap-faced smiles of children.  It’s easy to see God in the cancer patient who comes in with a brave smile and a chemotherapy update, filled with prayers and hope. 

It’s hard to see God in the diabetic who doesn’t show up for appointments until  I see her in the hospital on an insulin drip.  It’s hard to see God in the fifth admission in six months for alcoholic pancreatitis when he promised me the last four times that it wasn’t going to happen again.  It’s hard to see God in the frequent flyers, in the patients who make your heart drop when they’re on your schedule in the morning, in the angry and resentful and combative and uncaring.

Sometimes, I have to look really hard.  But it’s in the looking – in the moments when I’m standing outside an exam room taking a slow deep breath and reminding myself that even this woman is a child of God, and is created in the image of God, and is a reflection of God – it’s then that I find God most certainly in me.