Editor’s Note: GOOD NEWS Associate, Rosemary Zimmerman, is a Hospitalist Nurse Practitioner. On her days away from the hospital, she runs a free mobile health care ministry in her area for people who fall through the cracks of the medical system — the uninsured, poor, houseless, house-bound, or chronically ill. Rosemary offers her time without charge, but GNA welcomes donations to help her keep things running with electronic records, insurance, medical supplies and equipment. Thank you!     —Christine Hall, GNA Executive Director

AS I GO ABOUT MY DAILY AND WEEKLY ROUNDS, I AM OFTEN STRUCK — overwhelmed, even — by my powerlessness in the face of my patients’ suffering. Bureaucracy commonly triggers this feeling.

Once it took me and a dedicated family member several months of phone calls and repetitive faxing of paperwork back and forth (and back and forth) to convince the social security administration that a home-bound patient really, truly, was not dead. At other times, family dynamics are the culprit; I am not infrequently sent to the brink by the impossible-to-please relative, whose grief over a dying loved one translates into an implacable rage at whoever is nearest (often me).

One might think that my deepest sense of helplessness would occur in the face of disease and death, but that isn’t the case — for the most part, I’ve learned to accept illness and death as the fundamentally unavoidable inheritance of all flesh. It’s the all-too avoidable suffering often surrounding illness and death that makes me curse the skies.

If I’m cursing the skies during a hospital shift, one of my friends, a chaplain, often paraphrases Deuteronomy to me: “Remember, the Lord goes before you, and he will fight for you.” (Deuteronomy 1:30.)

One could read that verse as martial, but my friend doesn’t mean it that way. He is saying something like, “Stop. Breathe. Let God work; He is on the move.” A paraphrase of Galatians 2:20 could also convey his message: “Not you, but Christ who lives in you.”

All of this points to a truth I approach over and over and yet constantly fail to arrive at: when, in the love of God, I reach out towards the suffering of another, I join with that eternal love. In a very real way it is no longer I who reach. In the words of T.S. Eliot(1), there is only “one veritable transitory power.” God is the only mover; His love is the ocean in which my own love is lost as a single drop of rain is lost. Even the grace by which I desire to love, to reach, to encounter others in their suffering — is given by Him.

It’s grace upon grace (John 1:16) — grace upon unearned, overflowing grace.

 

(1) T.S. Eliot (d. 1965), “Ash Wednesday,” EnglishVerse.com, accessed May 28, 2025, https://englishverse.com/poems/ash_wednesday.
(2) Image credit: Christian R. Rohleder, “Bay of Biscay—stormy wind whips up the sea,” Glass Photography Community, https://glass.photo/pixxelwerk/5DXgo527V5LLslKmoO7Tgr