Not too far away or long ago, I was working as a hospital chaplain at Sutter Medical Center in Sacramento when a nurse suggested I visit one of her patients. The only reason she offered for her referral was that our patient might need “some counseling or something.”
Before entering the room, I sought more explanation from the patient’s chart. Turning to the patient history page, I read aloud, “Patient is consuming multiple six-packs each day.”
“Something indeed,” I muttered, repeating the nurse’s euphemism.A few steps away in the room, I met a man who was writhing in the pain of detoxification. I knew little about the process, but I once heard a doctor say that “Detox makes waterboarding look tame.”
Fixing me with a crazed look, the patient ordered me to “Get some &%@’n drugs, Doc!” He was, no doubt, assuming that the male entering his room wearing a necktie was his doctor.I took a deep breath and assured him I was his chaplain, not his doctor.
Arming himself again with a limited vocabulary, he fired another volley aimed at convincing me he didn’t care whether I was the pope; he wanted his drugs.I nodded and left the room to relay his message to the nurse.
A bit shocked, the old-school nurse asked me, “Did you tell him that he shouldn’t talk to a chaplain that way?” she asked. My forthcoming answer seemed to surprise her nearly as much as the patient’s vocabulary.“No. I think his language represents a kind of prayer.”
“Prayer?” she asked, as if now questioning my sobriety.I took her stance as invitation to say more. In the next few minutes, I shared my belief that God hears our expressions of agony, loss or pain as a prayer.
These prayers can be expressed in a wordless whimper, and God hears them. They can be voiced with bloodcurdling screams, and God hears them. They may be vented with words that offend the offhanded listener. The point is no matter how these words are uttered, God hears them and knows how to interpret them.
Our problem often comes when, perhaps like this nurse, we close our hearts and our ears to the kind of language expressed in that level of pain. We do this because we think pain ought not become offensive. “Pain should be neat and controlled,” we reason.
That’s not the way the Psalmist saw it when he wrote, “I cry aloud to the Lord; I lift up my voice to the Lord for mercy. I pour out my complaint before him; before him I tell my trouble” (Psalm 142:1-2).
And it certainly wasn’t the way Job saw it when he lost his entire family. “Therefore I will not keep silent; I will speak out in the anguish of my spirit, I will complain in the bitterness of my soul” (Job 7:11).
I’m not saying we should encourage this language in everyday use. I’m saying that if God doesn’t turn his ears away from even the most excruciating levels of human pain, then how can we?
At the end of the day, I like the metaphor Susan Lenzkes uses in her book, “When Life Takes What Matters.” She says expressing our anger is like beating upon the chest of God, but “… we beat on His chest from within the circle of His arms.”
I returned a few hours later to find that his nurse had finally given him the pain meds he needed.He apologized for the language he’d used toward his chaplain. “No worries,” I said. “All forgiven.”
A few minutes after that, I found the nurse in her station. “Thanks for your help,” I said. “God answers prayer chaplain, but sometimes he gets help from a nurse.”
Syndicated columnist Chaplain Norris Burkes began his chaplain career with both the active-duty Air Force and the Air National Guard until his retirement in 2014. He later served as a board-certified healthcare chaplain at Sutter Memorial, Kaiser, Methodist and Mather VA hospitals and continues to work with area Hospice. His column is syndicated to more than 35 accredited news outlets. Read past columns at www.thechaplain.net.
