I was at the hospital last night and spoke with the parent of a patient, and this parent was having a hard time dealing with the circumstances of their injured adult child (for those of you who don’t know me well, I have been an RN for over a decade). In the short conversation we had it came out that she is a believer, and she shared that she is having trouble holding onto hope in the circumstances. Now, in these types of not-good situations my job is a little more challenging than some because I actually have two jobs that can be in conflict with one another. My job as a nurse/employee is not to give people hope, but to give them an accurate assessment of the situation—which in some cases is absolutely bereft of hope, faith, or anything lifegiving. On the other hand, my job as a son of the Most High is to release life into any and every circumstance and take dominion over everything that opposes it. This is most especially true in my given sphere of influence, which includes but is not limited to my job as a nurse.
In the conversation with this individual, this person asked me what they could do because they felt they needed to do something to help their loved one recover. I encouraged them that while it can feel at times like prayer does nothing, God hears and responds to every single prayer we pray, and that prayer is never pointless or hopeless. This individual then shared that their thoughts and prayers had turned that evening to trying to bargain with God to take their life in place of their child.
It was at that moment that I decided to inject some truth into the conversation in a slightly different direction. You see, nurses end up wearing a lot of different hats while in a hospital or other care facility. We are the patient advocate, the waiter/waitress, the electronics technologist, the doctor’s assistant, the pseudo-social-worker, the assistant physical therapist, the state-appointed drug-dispenser, and for me more often than many, the chaplain and therapist. It certainly is part of my job description to offer emotional support, but given my level of expertise with inner healing, the human soul, counseling-adjacent-conversations, and overall ministry experience, I find myself in these situations more frequently than most. So, I opted to share with this struggling individual a bit about God’s nature and His plans for their family member. The goal of this wasn’t specifically to fix any one thing, but to reframe how they viewed the circumstances and their role in it. I can’t walk everyone through every step of how I might manage something if I was in a similar situation, but I can often give them some insight into a better and more lifegiving path forward, and I can pray for them.
I reminded this individual that God actually cares far more about the well-being of their loved one than they do, and that at no time ever would He require their life as an exchange for their kid—because God already traded His only-begotten Son for theirs. His plan from the beginning of creation and even before, has always and only been about Life. Jesus made very clear in John 10:10 that He and the Father were both collectively about Abundant Life, and that death, loss, and destruction are in direct opposition to their will. No matter the situation, regardless of how bad things might look, there is only ever one response from our Father, and that is to release life. You see, our Heavenly Father is lifegiving and in Him there is no darkness. He doesn’t have hidden motives and really isn’t difficult to understand. We have let pagan beliefs and legalistic old-covenant religion confuse us into believing God requires something from us in order to perform good works on our behalf when He has never required those things of us. The Bible tells us in Romans 5:10 that even while we were enemies of God that the Father sent the Son. And it is key to note that we were only His enemies in our own minds, because we were never enemies in His mind. We have been and will always be His beloved children. We spoke a bit longer, and after encouraging this family member with some more truth of God’s nature and His plans for their family, I prayed for this person, then we both separated and went about our business (I can’t even claim that I got “back to work” because I didn’t consider what I was doing to be somehow separate from my job).
Bad things happen. Difficult circumstances come to pass. Hard times arise, and we can only deal with them as best as we can in those moments. I don’t pretend to be some super-Christian who has it all figured out. I firmly know that I don’t. What I do know is that regardless of the circumstances that our mandate to release life, take dominion over corrupted creation, remove the decay from the cosmos, and to love all creation has never changed. Revelation 21 tells us there will come a day when Jesus wipes every tear from our eyes, and I am determined to be someone who apprehends the message of life and immortality such that I am alive in-body when that day arrives, and until then it is my task to help usher that day in. The Bible tells us that truth sets us free, and I think we have so often become convinced that if we bargain with God that we can somehow get His hand to move—when in reality He already moved in the person of Jesus Christ. It is impossible to trade God anything for anything, and most certainly trade yourself for someone else because He already made the trade. God already traded His son for yours. He already bankrupted heaven to redeem earth and everyone on it. He is madly and deeply in love with you, so no matter what situation, what circumstance, what darkness has been rearing itself in your life, His plans are only, always, and ever for life. Trust in that.
If you want to learn more about God’s plans for abundant life for you and your loved ones, I encourage you to pick up a copy of my books The Gospel of Life and Immortality and Faith to Raise the Dead, as well as my friend Tommy Miller’s books Deathless and Transfigured.
