Many of us have had to spend time in an Intensive Care Waiting Room.
Knowing a loved one is behind those closed doors fighting for life.
Waiting with expectation for each of those 15-minute visits when the hospital staff opens the doors to let us see our loved one for a brief moment.
A pastor wrote about the ICU waiting room:
I have spent long hours in the hospital intensive care unit… watching with anguished people… listening to urgent questions: Will my husband make it? Will my child walk again? How can I live without my companion of thirty years?”
The intensive care waiting room is different from any other place in the world. And the people who wait are different. They can’t do enough for each other. No one is rude. The distinctions that divide people in society melt away. A person is a father first, and any other distinctions are less important. The man without a job loves his wife as much as the successful business owner loves his, and everyone understands this. Each person pulls for everyone else.
In the intensive care waiting room, the world changes. Vanity and pretense vanish. The universe is focused on the doctor’s next report. If only it will show improvement. Everyone knows that loving someone else is what life is all about.
Could we learn to love like that if we realized that every day of life is a day in the waiting room?
Life is like the Intensive Care Waiting Room, and yet we often fail to remember this. Life is full of struggle and pain and difficulty. But instead of an illness or injury that has us struggling for physical life, our real struggle is one of the spirit. Temptations and sin pour into our lives leading to worry and anxiety that chokes out our ability to breathe. And yet, we fail to realize that every one of us walking this planet are struggling in much the same way.
Therefore everyone needs to pull for everyone else.
Loving others is what life is all about. Let’s stop being divisive over secondary matters. Let those less important things melt away. Let someone know that you love them and are pulling for them today.