God Cares
The year was 1956. While training in Pastoral Care at the Fergus Falls State Hospital, the chaplain asked me to go with him when he conducted a funeral for one of the hospital patients who in those days were called “inmates.” The chaplain asked me to meet him at his office on the day of the funeral. Thinking that he would be taking his car as we left the office, I was surprised when he said, “We’ll walk there.”
The chaplain had been a captain in the United States Army. During the Normandy invasion his platoon was one of the first to land on Omaha Beach and he was one of the first to fall wounded on those shores. A shell burst just a few yards from him and his body was torn to pieces by shrapnel. As he lay there deeply wounded, he recalled feeling a foot kick him and hearing the words, “This guy’s dead.” He didn’t know when, but sometime later he awoke in a hospital and recalled being told that a soldier of another race saw life in him, stooped down, picked him up and carried him to a field ambulance. The chaplain told me that he often regretted not having ever had the opportunity to meet the man.
The shrapnel left deep scares on much of his body, seriously injured one of his legs and the other one had to be amputated just above the knee.
And now some years later, his words “We’ll walk” told me much about the man.
The two of us walked down a tree-lined road following a farm truck as it slowly moved up a winding lane to a little cemetery on the top of a hill overlooking a green valley below. Quietly and without words the driver and the passenger got out, came to the back of the truck, removed the casket and carried it over to the opened grave and gently set it down. Then I realized that those in attendance would be the chaplain, two patients from the hospital and me.
As the chaplain began the service, his voice faded into the distance as I stood there thinking about what the chaplain had told me about this man as we walked to the cemetery. The man had been an “inmate” most of his life. No one came to see him. There had been a member of his family, a woman, who had come to visit him, but that was many years ago. Now at the time of his death there was no one, no one to inform, no one to call, no one to be there.
After the service the two quiet patients covered the damaged casket with dirt. “These damaged coffins were donated by the local funeral homes,” the chaplain later explained.
The truck and the men left. The chaplain left and said that if I wanted to stay, I was welcome to do so. The chaplain knew full well what he said. As I stayed there feeling the summer breeze coming from the green valley below some might have considered this a mountaintop experience. Not for me. It was the silent grave that spoke of a life lived in isolation.
Seminary training in those days didn’t focus on the psychology of relationships—psychology coming from the word psuché meaning soul.
It has been some 60 years since I left “that mountaintop.” Burnt into my memory since is the reason I trained there. To realize how evil can destroy relationships in multiple ways. Not just the wars, the conflicts of political parties, the lying and cheating that goes on but how sin and evil can corrupt marriages and families. It is the darkness that comes over us that renders us incapable of having emotional relationships that produce fruit. Evil in all of its forms prevents life from happening. Bad relationships, colored by evil are bent on destroying the other when in the process both are destroyed. The Word of God refers to this as a hardened heart. They are darkened in their understanding, alienated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them, due to their hardness of heart. Ephesians 4:8
Sir John Eccles coauthored a book entitled The Wonders of Being Human. It came to mind as I struggled to define evil. Awareness is of vital importance in relationships. We think of emotional awareness, rational awareness, intuitive awareness or all the ways we were created to be. But the darkness of sin gets in the way of every human relationship. Sadly no one knows to what extent this inmate from that mental hospital was seemingly unaware of his own life. For that reason he had to be cared for every day of his life. Eccles and Robinson in their book The Wonders of Being Human, they tell us that we can lose a portion of one of the hemispheres of our brain and still would be able to function. Somewhere in the depths of his soul did he carry memoires of family and friends that seem to have been blotted out?
The chaplain said the records show that he had been baptized. Would God then have known him regardless? Maybe your lives have not turned out the way you wanted them to. Maybe others have been unjust, even cruel and unfair to you. Others have told lies about you to contaminate the minds of others concerning you. Evil will go to no ends to destroy you. God offered up His Son Jesus Christ to create a new relationship with you. God really cares for us regardless of how alone and forsaken we may feel.
