Just Pray and Walk Away

Look, if I’m being honest, if I were in the hospital and a stranger walked into my room and asked me if they could pray for me, I would probably say, “No, I’m good but thanks.”

My refusing prayer would have nothing to do with my belief in God or my own feelings about whether or not I needed prayer.

I would very much like someone to pray for me.

But prayer is very intimate and leaves the person being prayed for feeling very vulnerable.  And if you’re in the hospital, you’re probably already feeling very vulnerable and uncomfortable and scared.  And you’re probably tired of strangers walking into your room every other minute.

I remember my mom telling me a story many years ago.  She was in the hospital, asleep when she suddenly woke up to a male nurse standing by her bed, hovering over her.

“I’ve come to take your blood,” the nurse said.

Whenever my mom told that story, she always gave the nurse one of those Dracula/Bela Lugosi accents.

So in other words, people expect strangeness and awkwardness when they’re in a hospital, trying desperately to feel better.

And the last thing I want to do as a spiritual care volunteer is add to their discomfort.

So I don’t take it personally when I ask a patient if they would like me to pray for them and they refuse.  Though sometimes I inwardly chuckle over their reasons.

“Thanks, but I got prayed for yesterday,” someone told me.

“Thanks, but he’s got his deacon here and his pastor is on the way.  We have it covered.”

Okay, really … I want to say.  That’s your reason?  You’ve had enough prayer?

It makes me wish for the straightforwardness of the woman who simply told me one day to “Get out!”

This past Saturday, I missed the notation on my list of patients that said that this one man did not want visitors.

But when I went into his room and introduced myself, he was all smiles and when I asked him if he wanted prayer, he said, “Why not?” but then added, “I’m not very religious though.”

“That’s okay,” I said, and I prayed.

Another patient, that same day, got in an argument with his wife over whether or not he wanted prayer.

His wife groaned and looked at me.  “He asks me what I think about everything.”

After a minute of watching the back and forth bickering between the two with no resolution on the did-he-want-prayer topic, I pulled out a prayer card.  “How ‘bout I just leave a prayer card with you?”

The man grew quiet and looked a little disappointed.  “I will keep you in my prayers,” I assured him.  He was silent.  Just a few minutes ago, he had told me he felt like he was sitting there just waiting to die.

“You’re not alone,” I told him, as I have told others.  “God is here.  Okay?  He has this.”

Another man, who didn’t have his dentures in, had a whole conversation with me that I did not understand even one word of.

And when I asked him if he wanted prayer, I still couldn’t understand if he was telling me yes or no.  I kept nodding or shaking my head, trying to get him to mirror me at least, so I could feel comfortable with some sort of consent to pray.

Finally, I just gave up and prayed.  I figured it better to err on the side of prayer than no prayer.

One woman, this past week, looked at me with such reverence as if I was an angel come to visit her.  I had been warned that she was confused.  She thought I had been to visit her before.  She thought I had prayed for her before.  And she looked at me, again, with such joy and awe that I didn’t bother to correct her, even as I was growing slightly jealous and competitive with this other nameless prayer warrior who had been to visit.

I always ask God to help me keep my pride in check when I do my prayer rounds.  I always ask him to make me humble, to remind me that this isn’t about me.  It’s hard when you’re an obsessive perfectionist, which is why I wind up praying so much.

There is, let me say, nothing more humbling though when someone looks at you like you’re angel, like you are God’s own emissary and you know in your heart that you don’t deserve to be looked at that way, that you couldn’t be farther away from angelic if you tried.

But there is also something so personally healing, so personally uplifting, in having someone look at you and see the very best in you, the unencumbered spirit within you, the real you, the you that you strive to be but are pretty sure will only be fully realized in heaven.

It is one of the many reasons why I’m so blessed when I pray for others.

The other day, when I was in the bathroom getting cleaned up, I noticed the shower cleaner sitting on my sink.  The overhead light struck the words on the bottle kind of funny, obscuring some of the letters, so that for a second, all I could read was this … “Just pray and walk away.”

Instead of “Just spray and walk away.”

Pray and walk away.

That’s what I do at the hospital every Saturday.  Pray and walk away. 

I visit people for mere minutes.  I am not even a footnote in their life story.  I leave knowing that many of them will not remember me afterword. 

I pray and walk away.  I leave their lives.

But they don’t leave mine.

Have a blessed week.