streaming

He was sitting at the kitchen table, tapping to a beat inaudible to rest of the house, unaware that a choice today would change a forever for some one he had not met, would never meet. At the hospital where he spends so many precious hours the mundane trickles in so slowly that before one realizes it they are flooded by impatience and hardened heart. He stands at this precipice this morning and doesn't even know it.

His wife walks in, hair tangled and yesterdays makeup smudged beneath half open eyes. He thinks she is cute and beautiful like this but forgets to tell her almost every day. As she sits down to the silence of sleeping children she asks what he is going to do about the patient he told her of yesterday. The one with the failing body, the one with a sudden cancer diagnosis and a fate so unpredictable that even he, with all of his training, can't put a time table to. In that moment while he sat shaking his head with doubt she said something simple, though monumental.

"I think you should pray with him. Maybe even with his family. From what you said they seem to feel pretty hopeless and prayer is what gives me hope, so...I mean. If you don't, who will? Right?"

Sitting in that chair hearing those words his immediate response resonates inside as a resounding, "Are you kidding me? No!" but he fights those dark whispers and says, "Maybe I will."

That was the end of it. The whole conversation. What would come of it mattered to so many...



--I'm just playing around with some thoughts I've had lately.