Volume 4, Issue 3, January 1996

LOVE OR HATE?

I had just finished my pastoral visits in the General and Marine Hospital, Collingwood, and as I passed a ward I heard a woman scream.
Startled, I asked the head nurse at the nursing station what had happened. Knowing me she was confidential and explained the cries had come from a young mother suffering arthritis so severely they were afraid she would not live long. She explained that they were giving the patient the limit of morphine without terminating her life.

The nurse went further to explain the woman was a patient from a rural district some distance away and it was difficult for her pastor to see her often. She asked me if I would visit her then and now.

I sat at the bedside of the woman who was obviously in great pain. She welcomed me as a friend and as a minister. When I asked about her family she began to cry and said she had had a wonderful daughter but she had been taken away from her. She wanted to tell me about it.

She told me about her happiness as a youth in her farm community and the little rural Baptist church there, how she and a neighbouring young man fell in love, were married in the church, and set up farming on his family farm.

A daughter was born to them. The parents loved this child and adored her. She came of school age and attended the rural school down the road.

But, one stormy winter's day when the concession road was icy and snow covered, the child was struck by the neighbouring farmer's car as she crossed the road. The child was killed.

The stricken mother told me this neighbour was a deacon in their church and now she hated him. She stopped going to church, exclaiming how could she sit there and see "that murderer" sitting ahead of her. Despite all attempts at reconciliation she maintained her hatred toward this farmer, the church, and her God who would allow such a catastrophe to happen.

I prayed with her and left. But her anguish affected me and I could not forget her story. So the next day I returned to the hospital and visited her again. She welcomed me. I asked her to do something for me. She agreed and to her horror I asked her to pretend she was the neighbour who had struck and killed her child. I asked her to try and feel as he must, a neighbour, an elder of the church, watching the young couple and their daughter living next door and worshipping at the church. How proud they were of them.

THEN, that terrible day when the child darted across the road in front of his car in the blizzard, his trying to stop on the icy road, the thud of hitting the little body, and the finding her dead. As if this was not enough now her mother hated him, could not attend church, and was wasting away in the hospital. How must he feel?

The mother started to cry and said to me, what have I done to that poor man, what can I do to repay him? I said simply, forgive him. Together we prayed and she forgave the man.

The next week when I made my hospital rounds I checked to visit this woman and she was no longer there. Her doctor came along and asked what I had done to his patient? He said he was afraid she was a terminal case and suddenly, like a miracle, she began a swift recovery and was already sent home.

Later I was able to contact the woman's pastor who told me she was in better health and back to church.

The wonderful power of forgiveness.

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"Religion NOW" is published in limited edition by the Rev. Ross E. Readhead, B.A., B.D., Certificate of Corrections, McMaster University, in the interest of furthering knowledge and participation in religion. Dialogue is invited and welcomed.