Emergency Room Set Up

 We sat outside the Emergency Room waiting for hours before the call finally came. We grabbed the gurney and went inside. As we approached the nurse’s station, a respiratory therapist held out his thumb to the ER doctor, “Hey doc, can you have a look at my thumb? It hurts like crazy.”

I felt like I was walking onto a stage; the director having rehearsed the script with the actors, it was time for the medic to say his lines. It had to be a set up.

I walked over and listened to the doc….”Well, it doesn’t look broken. What did you do to it?

“Nothing. It just started hurting,” replied the respiratory therapist.

“Well, I don’t know what I can do”, the doc said as he walked away.

I walked over to him and said, “So you don’t know why it hurts?”

“No, I didn’t do anything. It just started hurting.”

I checked it out.. No deformity, no signs of trauma. “How bad is the pain?”

“About a seven.”

“Do you want to be healed?”

What are you gonna do, some kinda….(he makes the sign of the cross and rolls his eyes)

I smiled… “Well… something like that, but not exactly.”

The nurse sitting at the desk piped up…”I wanna see this!”

I told her to come over and watch and asked if he wanted to be healed. He said, “Yeah – go for it.”

I placed my index finger on the part of his thumb that was in pain and commanded the pain to leave, in the name of Jesus then asked how he felt.

“A little better,” (Now he was smiling)

I told the pain to leave a second time then told the tendons, ligaments, nerves and bones to be healed. “Move it around, how does it feel?”

He was smiling from ear to ear now, amazed at what God was doing.

“Well…that’s weird. It feels pretty good.”

“Is there any pain at all?”

“Just a little.”

I told the pain to leave one more time and had him check it out.

“Well, now there’s no pain at all. But my other thumb hurts.”

Thinking that maybe a spirit was moving around causing the pain to move, I asked, “Are you serious?”

“Nope…just messing with ya. It feels great.”

We both began laughing. I said, “God’s pretty cool huh? I gave him a card to my website and said, “If you have any questions, you can get a hold of me here.”

We talked with the nurse, got report and loaded our patient. He was a FedEx driver who passed out while driving on a 3 lane freeway. He crossed all the lanes of traffic and hit the barrier between East and Westbound traffic. The truck eventually came to a stop. No one else was involved or hurt. He suffered glass cuts and a subdural hematoma but was otherwise fine. We transferred him to a larger hospital for a neurology consult.

On the way, we talked. I told him what had just happened with the respiratory therapist. The FedEx driver felt like God had already given him a miracle by keeping others from being injured in the accident. But he let me pray with him to have the hematoma and the headache healed.

Some days God orchestrates our lives down to the most intricate detail and exact second. Maybe that’s what it means when it says the steps of a righteous man are ordered by God. I don’t feel particularly righteous. I just feel blessed to be a part of this divinely written play where the Holy Spirit is the director and Jesus is the star.