"They told me he's going to die," a father says to me, right before crumbling to the floor in a barren hallway. We sat on the ground for a bit, and eventually moved to a nearby bench. We'd been talking for weeks about this possibility. I remember wiping his tears from my shoulder. I remember wiping my own tears for his child. Today, I got to reintroduce myself to that child and hug that father, and, yes, there were tears, so many tears.
This is the fruit of "stranger ministry" in an acute care setting, over multiple years. Stranger Ministry is hospitality, it is raw and unpredictable, ungated and real. I don't have the privilege of long term, relationship building, pew sitting, small group attending parishioners.
Instead, I have years of living and working in the same community. I have bedsides, hallways and elevator meetings, generational losses and stories of communities who "remember before this wing was built". I have your name loosely in my back pocket because I was there when your mother-in-law died, when your son broke his leg, when your husband OD'd. I sat with your children in waiting areas, I called the local police department looking for your pets, I provided you a boxed lunch. I gave you clothes when you came in partially dressed because clothes were not a priority when your child wasn't breathing. I was there when your child wasn't breathing.
This job is *frankly* weird as hell. And yet, I wouldn't want to be anywhere else.
