Why Won't Jesus Take Me To Heaven?

At age forty, I left corporate America to follow the call to ministry.

I was well educated, having been steeped in a refined broth of rationalism and critical reasoning, read all the appropriate European authors, perched my fanny on the erudite ruins at Delphi, and stumbled wide-eyed through Jerusalem’s Yad Vashem holocaust memorial. I was experienced as a world traveler who had skied the Alps, gone elbow to elbow with Chinese businessmen for platefuls of ugly fish in Kuala Lumpur restaurants, and lived amongst the “lost Woodstock generation” who shuffled around the west side of Greenwich Village in their Birkenstocks, avoiding exposure to the sun. I was even married with three young kids, the youngest a mumbo-jumbo yacking, couscous tossing extrovert.

I was ready for anything and knew it. What’s more, I knew that I knew it.

In seminary, professors work hard to relieve students of all their goofball, folkloric misconceptions about why and what we believe. They teach you that the Bible doesn’t really say what you think it says unless you’ve personally translated the old papyrus scrolls from the original Greek or Hebrew for yourself, dissected the grammar, and consulted all the scholars who’ve spent devoted and low paid lifetimes figuring out things like whether Paul actually wrote the letter to the Ephesians or if it was written by a follower or even an impostor.

Now I was really ready, theologically and Biblically locked and loaded.

And then began my hospital pastoral care rotation, clinical field work that could burn the corn-based wax shine off Helen of Troy’s golden apple. This is where you face the test of learning whether you can render all that theological and Biblical understanding into something meaningful in people’s lives. People who don’t care about the Greek or the Hebrew or the authorship of the letter to the Ephesians.

People who just want some answers.

The nurse administrator who ran the desk on the blood and organ diseases floor was sharp as a tack. Her smooth, perfect skin was somewhere between the color of maple syrup and green tea and her eyes never quite rose above the horizon of her reading glasses. She could see people like me coming before we’d even driven into the parking garage or waived our newly laminated security badges for the first time. She could eradicate that waxy shine from your golden apple faster than battery acid.

I introduced myself and asked for a patient list.

“Whatcha bring me?” she monotoned without looking up from her paperwork. There were several lists sitting on her desk.

“I, I beg your pardon? I’m sorry. Do you mean some kind of authorization or something?”

“I mean a muffin or a latte or something. But you don’t appear to have anything like that. Do you? No treat, no list.”

I stammered something unintelligible as she took a long drag off a diet soda.

“Go down this hall to room 41. Start there and work back. Pay attention.” She finished these gruff instructions by skewing her lower jaw slightly sideways and poking her tongue against her molars in a kind of disgusted way. I started down the hall.

Something I didn’t know about a diabetes patient on welfare is that either the person has feet or doesn’t and entering room 41, I immediately noticed that the sheets at the foot of the bed were curiously flat up to the knees. I swallowed and stepped forward to greet Irene with some sort of empathy not found in the doctrines of either Calvin or Luther. I was trying not to gaff and say something stupid like “How are you feeling?” or “I’m the chaplain today, is there something I can do for you?”

I spoke her name and asked where she was from. I asked about her family. I asked about her home and how she had gotten to the hospital. I asked when she might be released. I asked anything I could in order to avoid talking about her medical condition and her missing limbs. She was eighty-nine and lived in a small town in the mountains north of our city, had no children, a brother in a distant state, and no other family.

After a while, I asked if she wished to pray.

“No,” she mumbled weakly, taking long, slow breaths every couple of words. “It’s too late for prayer. I just want to know something. I want you to tell me something chaplain, pastor, whoever you are.”

“Okay,” I responded quietly, reluctantly.

“I just want to know why I’m still here. I’m sick and not gonna get better. Been in here three times this year. All they can do is amputate again.”

I said I was sorry and that she was probably still in the hospital because the doctors still had some hope.

“Those doctors don’t have hope. They’ve got walls full of degrees and microscopes and clean white jackets but they’ve got no hope. Anyway, I don’t want to know why I’m still in the hospital.”

Her eyes moistened and streams of tears silently slid down the sides of her ashen face and into her matted, white hair as she lay flat on her back.

“I want to know what only you can tell me, chaplain, pastor. What you have to tell me. I want to know why Jesus is leavin’ me here this way. Why won’t he just take me to heaven today, to be with my Mama?”