Photo by Maya Nussenzweig

One of the reasons I love being a hospital chaplain is because there have been several times where I’ve said something and then thought, “Wow. I didn’t know I knew that. I must be channeling Spirit.” This usually happens when the person I’m with reacts in a powerful way to what I’m saying. This happened last week.

I was with a very sweet man I’ll call James who was in a terrible pain crisis. It was all he could do to talk without whimpering. I asked if wanted me to come back later, but no, he really wanted me to stay. He wanted to talk about God and why God put him in the middle of a “s**t storm.”

“I moved my mother here from her home country so that I could care for her,” he said. We have three boys at home—ten to sixteen. Wife’s a nurse. It was going okay, but then my mother had a heart attack. My wife did CPR on her until the medics arrived. But they couldn’t revive her.”

“Oh, I am sorry,” I said.  “When did this happen?”

“Yesterday.”

“Yesterday?!” I was shocked. No wonder he felt like he was in a s**t storm: he’s in tremendous physical pain, trapped in a hospital, powerless to help his family and his mother just died.

“And you know what is worst of all?” he asked.  “My sons were there and they will have to relive that moment over and over for the rest of their lives.”

I thought about this and in my mind saw his wife trying so hard to resuscitate her mother-in-law. And then there were three boys watching all this. How did they see it?

I said gently, “The thing is, we don’t know how your sons perceived it. Maybe your sons will say, “I will remember that day where my mama was so strong and brave and did CPR on Grandma.’ Perhaps another son will say, ‘I remember how my brother put his arm around me and held me and that moment I knew he would always have my back.’

He nodded. “I see, I see.”

“And we don’t know how they will remember it. Because how they remember it now won’t be the same as how they remember twenty years from now.”

“Yeah, yeah.” His eyes filled with tears. “Thank you.”

And that is when I felt as if I must be channeling Spirit because I don’t think I could have come up with that all by myself.

The next day I was editing an episode of my podcast. I always start off each episode with what I think of as a really insightful quote from my guest. My guest for this episode was Julie Davis, who was a member of our church before she moved.

She said, “I can’t really do anything about the past, but I can do something about the narrative I have about it and how I hold that.” And that’s when it hit me: I was not channeling Spirit, I was channeling Julie Davis. How could I have forgotten not only that she said that, but that I chose those exact words for the opening?

So yes, Julie was channeling Spirit and therefore so was I. Her words flowed into me and then into James and who knows where they go from there?  Spirit is like a river flowing through one person to another and our words of love, inspiration, challenge or comfort, can change lives forever.

That is why sharing words in any form can be a deeply intimate act of communication. There are ripples and eddies of consequence that flow not just from our words, but our actions and our thoughts.

God is still speaking, especially in the midst of a storm.