The Gift of Life

This week has surrounded me with reminders of the preciousness, yet delicateness of life. Yesterday I sat eating BBQ with my family at the Heart Transplant celebration picinic. Just last July '05 my father received a heart transplant that has restored him to health that he has not experienced in nearly 5 years.
I sat amidst nearly 100 others who also in the last 10 years have received the same life changing experience. The gratitude felt for life by many of the heart recepients was evident. Nevertheless, the celebration cannot go without the recognition and morning of the life lost inorder to make the others restoration possible. These thoughts are just a small portion of what has been added to a week long pondering of the constant enterchange of life and death.

This past week at work, at one point, I had to just sit back and take in all that was happening. The heaviness and realization of the nature of my work hit me all at once. As I sat to take it all in there was a family actively grieving the loss of their father. Not yet passed on, but actively dying after a decision was made to withdrawal lifesupport efforts. As this family grieved another was rejoicing the opportunity for new life. Another man had earlier heard that his long wait for a heart transplant was over because they had received a match (not from the previously mentioned man). Furthermore, the patient that I was taking care of was a 21 year old girl who just found out she has an incurable disease. After a week of tests hoping to find a cause to be treated we were at the end of the rope and must settle on the fact that she has primary pulmonary hypertension and probably 2 years to live. I just had to sit back and take in the reality that the cycle of life was presently spinning around me and I truly had no control over it.

I don't often think so deeply about the job that I do. It is easy to simply get clinical and so busy with the work that you are unable to really think about what is happening around you. This is probably good most of the time. But this complied with readings from The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis cause me to want to live a different kind of life. Lewis writes:
Consider too what undesirable deaths occur in wartime. Men are killed in places where they knew they might be killed and to which they go, if they are at all of the Enemy's [God] party, prepared. How much better for us if all humans died in costly nursing homes amid doctors who lid, nurses who lie, friends who lie, as we have trained them, promising life to teh dying, encouraging the belief that sickness excuses indulgence, and even, if our workers know their job, withholding all suggestion of a priest lest it should betray to the sick man his true condition.

Now you must understand that this segment is as though Screwtape (the devil or head demon) is instructing Wormwood (his nephew demon) on how to better distract or take captive a human in order to win him to "The Father Below".

OK... heavy stuff. Didn't mean to go so deep. But man does all this make me want to live a different kind of life. Please no shrivled up nursing home.