Friday of the Fifteenth Week of Ordinary Time

Hezekiah was one of the few kings the prophets liked. He listened to them and made serious reforms to the religious rites as they were practiced in Jerusalem. He also accepted Isaiah’s advice during the Assyrian siege – that he should trust in God – and the Assyrians retreated.

So he had reason to expect favorable treatment from God when he suffered what seemed an incurable affliction. And he was more than a little disappointed when Isaiah told him bluntly: Put your house in order, for you are about to die; you shall not recover."

A doctor came to me in the hospital a few weeks ago. “Go visit Mr. B__,” he told me, “I’ve just given him some very bad news.”

Periodically our mortality rises up in front of us and we tremble. It may pass in an instant, as when an automobile crash is narrowly averted. Or the ominous pall may hang over us much longer, as when we’re waiting for the results of a test to come back. The not-knowing can be unbearable.

I was hit by a truck in 1993. Recovering consciousness in an ambulance and feeling the hurt in my back, I wiggled my toes and ankles. Thank God, they moved! But six months later a policeman told me, “We didn’t think you’d make it to the hospital. A bicyclist struck by a truck going sixty miles an hour may recover consciousness but he’ll bleed to death internally.”

I often think of that incident.

I meet many veterans who know they’re living on borrowed time. Some need blood transfusions every few months or weeks. Many are listed as “palliative,” meaning their condition is terminal but we don’t know how long it will take. And, of course, I often visit the hospice unit.

Despite his life of piety, Hezekiah took the news pretty hard: “He turned his face to the wall.”

Many years ago the pastor sent me to visit a teenaged girl. “You’re young,” he said, “you can relate to her.”

Her parents welcomed me and told me she was refusing any more dialysis. She had lived with it too long. She wanted to be normal and healthy like other girls. Or else she wanted to die.

When I went to her room I found her in bed, with her face to the wall. When I spoke to her, she told me to go away.

I stayed, talking to her for a long time, trying to think of things to say. I thought if she would just look at me we could make some progress. Young as I was, I did not have the patience to let her alone in her grief and hope that, by repeated visits, I might win her trust. Nor could I respect her decision to refuse more dialysis. I wanted to save her.

I kept asking her just to look at me, and she kept refusing. Finally, in terrible anger, she turned and glared at me and I saw her face, dark, green and horrid. Instantly she turned away again and I was left trembling.

I stayed a few minutes longer, trying to act as if “It’s okay, you are beautiful in God’s sight.” -- but I never went back.

Sometimes our mortality is more than we can bear. It’s an enormous reality that seems to darken the sky. It bursts upon us like an unexpected eclipse of the sun.

And then it passes. From some mysterious, deep place in our hearts the Holy Spirit whispers to us, “You are mine. I will not lose you. Everything that the Father gives me will come to me, and I will not reject anyone who comes to me, because I came down from heaven not to do my own will but the will of the one who sent me. And this is the will of the one who sent me,  that I should not lose anything of what he gave me, but that I should raise it on the last day.