He was crying when I met him, his tiny lungs frantically trying to draw oxygen into his system. He laid there, chest heaving, congested to the point of suffocation. His head was craned back, his neck straining to swallow. He couldn’t move. “Oh, little one…” He would breathe in and out a couple of times before groaning in discomfort.
I ran to the nurse.
“That one can’t breathe. Can you help him?”
She administered some sort of saline solution into his nose via syringe, and then inserted a suction tube. Debris and clotted blood came out into the tube from his nose, so much more than should ever fit inside such a small person. “Oh, little one, no wonder you couldn’t breathe…”
The nursed turned to me. “He had a nosebleed earlier today. It clotted, and this is why he could not breathe.” I thought, “How long ago did he have the nosebleed? How long has he been laying there, suffocating in his own blood?” I overcame my fear of getting yelled at and adjusted his head, taking the strain off of his neck. He fell asleep immediately. “Oh, Jesus, give him rest. You can heal him. Please heal him. Whatever he has…will you just give it to me? Let me take it from him. Please…Stay with him.”
At the next bed was a baby, looking to be no more than a year old. He looked frightened. I smiled into that sweet face and stroked his hair, and then stopped short. The tube in his nose traveled about halfway under his head, where it had disconnected from his feeding tube. There was a brown liquid seeping into his pillow and his sheets, covering the side of his head that lay on the pillow. He was breathing the debris in and out of his nose from the feeding tube.
I ran to the nurse.
She looked him over and raised her eyebrows in surprise. As she changed the sheets, I held him. Beyond words, I whispered, “Jesus…Jesus…Jesus…”
I placed him back onto clean sheets. The nurse tucked him in. “There. All better, sweet one.”
“Jesus, please care for him.”
I came to a young mother holding a tiny baby girl. Her name was fortunate. “How many weeks old is she?” her mother stared blankly, past the point of tears. “Five months.” She had been in the hospital for three of them.
The last woman I talked to was holding her two month old son. “Is he your first baby?” she nodded. “Yes, first baby. It is his kidneys. They say his heart, it can stop at any time. But God can heal him. I believe he will live.” My heart ached. “may I hold him?”
as I was praying for healing over him and peace for his mother, our contact came to the door. “it’s time to go.” He laid his hand gently on the baby’s head. I broke. “You will live, little one. You will grow old. You will go home with your mom and dad. Live.”
My legs somehow carried me out of that room and out of the hospital, into the parking lot and into the rest of this fallen world.
Our world, it is broken, and the brokenness has made its way into my heart. I pray it never ceases to break me, move me, and call me to action. Until He returns and unbreaks the world, I will run to the broken. I will bend down to the dying. I will kneel by the wounded and lay in the dust with the hurting. I will break, and scar, and stain my body with blood and tears. I want to love as He would, with dirty hands and a broken heart. I want to kiss His pierced feet and know that I faced the brokenness the way He did, entered in and received it into myself…and gave joy in return.
