“Rise, pick up your stretcher, and go home.”
At end of every surgery and hospital stay, we tell patients to get home and then follow up appointments are scheduled. We issue discharge cards with all the instructions which are reiterated numerous times by the staff nurse and resident doctors.
I have told countless patients to rise and go home. I often meet some of them to inform me that they are cancer free …. and that’s the best feeling in the world while some return on follow up with recurrence of cancer and it breaks my heart to inform them about the same.
Having stood on both sides of the fence , I can understand the anxiety and stress the patients go through. It’s undeniably scary! But when the Lord Jesus tells someone the very same words and we “overthink” and have “bad thoughts” .. do not forget this passage , Jesus is the son of God and everything he does is a command – literally the Gospel truth.
Often we don’t have faith in God and wonder how we will go through it all hardships, mental breakdowns, physical injuries and we lose hope.
Let us be like the man who picked his mat and left to praise God and everything we receive this command during our work, let us rise up to the occasion and pick our ,at and leave to spread our faith to everyone.
Jesus took my burdens and rolled them into the see .. never to remember evermore.
A line from a favourite hymn of my childhood convent days …. made me imagine God as a huge muscular man dumping all the people I disliked from a cliff into the sea.
Its time we focus on being better people and faithful Christians. Amen
