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JUST ANOTHER DAY IN EMS
I delivered a baby on the ambulance stretcher
I baptized a newborn who’s life ended before it began.
I hugged a frightened child.
I was kissed by an intoxicated old man.
I held the hand of a teenage girl while she delivered a 3 pound baby.
I listened to the mournful squeak of a stretcher being wheeled to the morgue.
I gently stroked the fragile hand of a 102 year old woman.
I hesitated at the outreached hand of a 300 pound prisoner in handcuffs.
I trudged for ten hours in my boots.
I had a teenager vomit on those same boots.
I rubbed the feverish body of a 14-year-old cancer patient.
I cradled the ice-cold hand of a child hit by a car.
I was referred to as "an angel of mercy".
I was called every four-letter word in the book.
I always see fear in people’s eyes.
I never see joy or relief.
I listened to a tormented voice pleading for the preservation of life.
I heard the threatening words of one bent on self destruction.
I spoke with a girl who was hoping she had the flu, not a pregnancy.
I see innocent people hurt by a drunk driver, and the drunk driver is never hurt.
I marveled at the genius of a cardiologist.
I saw a 12-year-old boy who shot himself in the head, and the gun was still loaded at his feet.
I talked in circles with a schizophrenic person.
I was horrified at the battered body of a child whose parents were incapable of love.
I gazed at a horribly burned body.
I shuddered at a cold water drowning.
I see women beaten up by their spouses, but they never press charges.
I walk into houses and do CPR with family watching over my shoulder in tears.
I arrive at serious auto accidents, and the first words I hear are, "Am I going to die?"
I find out hours later they did die.
I listen to the repeated question "Why?", from a family devastated by death.
I search my soul for the answers to their question.
This is just another day in EMS.
SOURCE: Derek Perry, EMT 1. Foothill Ambulance Co.
Sacramento, CA. http://www.members.cox.net/acurrence/
poems.htm
The consummate storyteller Charles Swindoll says “ If the same thing happened to sleepers today, every church would have to build a morgue in the basement. There isn’t an experienced preacher who hasn’t faced the most incredible (sometimes hilarious ) slumbering saints in the pew. I’ve seen them bump their heads on the back of the pew in front of them…snore out loud…stay seated when everyone else stood…drool on their Bible… and even drop their hymn book, then jump when it hits the floor.
I’ve watched couples nod in magnificent rhythm, perfect timing…. And then there was the lady who had the strangest wheeze while snoring – a shrill, stutter-like sound that reminded you of a chattering chimpanzee. She kinda looked like one when she slept, come to think of it.” [Charles Swindoll. Come Before Winter And Share My Hope. (Portland: Multnomah Press, 1985) p. 185.]
For more from Chuck, visit http://www.insight.org
Here’s a passage from Time Magazine, which named him the Person of the Year for 2001.
On the morning of September 11th, primary day of the New York City, Rudy Giuliani was paddling along with all the other lame ducks into oblivion. The tower of strength had become an object of pity: the iron man’s cancer made him vulnerable, the righteous man’s adultery made him hypocritical, the loyal man’s passions - for his city and its cops and its streets and its ballplayers - divided the city even as he improved it. After abandoning Gracie Mansion, his marriage in flames, he was camping out with a friend on the Upper East Side, and now it was time to choose his successor, and the end was in sight.
The end was, in fact, just a few blocks away. Having raced to the scene at the first news of the attacks, Giuliani was nearly buried alive. In the hours that followed, he had to lock parts of the city down and break open others, create a makeshift command center and a temporary morgue, find a million pair of gloves and dust masks and respirators, throw up protections against another attack, tame the mobs that might be looking for vengeance and somehow persuade the rest of the city that it had not been fatally shot through the heart.
It was an occasion to discover what we already were. "Maybe the purpose of all this," Rudy Giuliani said at a funeral for a friend, "is to find out if America today is as strong as when we fought for our independence or when we fought for ourselves as a Union to end slavery or as strong as our fathers and grandfathers who fought to rid the world of Nazism and communism." The terrorists, he argues, were counting on our cowardice. They’ve learned a lot about us since then, and so have we.
But at the dawn of the new millennium, New York mayor Rudy Giuliani emerged from the ashes of the smoldering World Trade Center rubble to calm a frightened and anxious nation. And by leading the city through a crisis of unimaginable horror diabolically designed to cripple the most powerful country on earth, Giuliani staked his claim as this century’s first great leader.
God turned into good what you meant for evil. Genesis 50:20
A premature baby thought to be stillborn was found by her mother, alive, after 12 hours in a morgue in northern Argentina.
Analia Bouter was only six months pregnant when she went into labor and gave birth to a baby girl she'd planned to name Liliana Abigail or Luciana Abigail. The baby was to be her fifth child, but when the little girl was born on April 3rd at 10:24 AM, doctors told Bouter that her daughter was stillborn. The distraught parents returned home to grieve, in possession of a death certificate citing "unknown causes" instead of their baby girl.
But Bouter couldn't bear to leave her daughter in the morgue without at least getting a picture of the child--and she got a massive shock when she returned to visit her baby's "body." The mother of five said she believed she was hallucinating, because when the drawer in which the child resided was opened, she heard a cry--and she says she observed her tiny, frost-covered child breathing after twelve hours in the morgue refrigerator.
Bouter says:
"We went to the morgue, and they showed us the casket nailed closed. My husband managed to open the drawer, where we found her wrapped in a white sheet and saw her tiny hand touch her face... I fell to my knees."
She explains that the little girl was literally ice cold after her half-day languishing in the drawer:
"My baby was born at 10:24am and at 11:05am was already in the drawer. She spent 12 hours in the freezing cold of that morgue. I saw for myself the ice on her body."
Investigations are underway as to how the error could have occurred. Chaco pr...
WHAT ARE YOU PREPARED TO DO?
In the movie The Untouchables, Eliot Ness, played by Kevin Costner, is frustrated because he cannot bring down Al Capone. So he asks for a street wise Irish beat cop, played by Sean Connery, for his help. The Irish cop agrees under one condition. He said always be ready to answer the question "What are you prepared to do?" He told Ness, "If he sends one of your to the hospital, send one of his to the morgue!"
Later in the movie, the Irish cop is shot by one of Capone’s men and Ness finds him barely alive and in a pool of his own blood. With his dying breath, he grabs Ness by the tie and says, "What are you prepared to do?"
THE MEANEST MAN IN TEXAS
Let's finish with the true and amazing story of Clyde Thompson.
Clyde's father was a Bible salesman, but when he was old enough to stay home alone, he began refusing to go to church with the rest of the family. Most Sundays, while his family was in church, Clyde was hunting.
One Sunday afternoon in 1929, when he was 17 years old, he met some men in the woods, and for some reason Clyde killed the men. So at the age of 17, he was the youngest man in Texas history to be sentenced to death in the electric chair. Two years later, he became the youngest man on death row at Huntsville Penitentiary.
As the date of his execution neared, Clyde listened to a radio preacher and asked for the man to come to the prison and baptize him. The preacher came and Clyde was baptized.
Legal complications kept him from being executed. Unfortunately, things began to go very badly for him and he was worked so hard at the prison work farm that he lost his faith.
He began trying to escape and a number of prisoners were killed while trying to escape with Clyde. Clyde was shot through the shoulder in one of the attempts. While on death row he got into a fight and killed two other prisoners, making a total of four people he had killed.
As the years passed, Clyde Thompson was tagged by his own prison mates as the meanest man in the State of Texas. He developed such a terrible reputation inside death row that they put him in isolation. Clyde was put in an old building that used to be the morgue. A steel door was put in place and the only opening was about a foot square with bars. There was no running water and no electricity. Because this morgue sat between two very tall buildings inside the prison, daylight could only enter for six hours each day.
After being in the isolation for 2 or 3 months, Clyde asked a guard to bring him a Bible. He knew they wouldn't give him anything else to read, but he was bored. He just wanted something to read. He decided he would try to prove the Bible wasn't from God because it was full of contradictions--at least that's what he had heard. But the more he studied it, the more he became convinced it was God's truth. He came to realize that Christianity was man's only hope and he repented in tears on his knees day and night for months. Clyde kept reading the Bible and asking God if He could forgive a wretch like him.
A change began to come over Clyde Thompson. The guards noticed it. Later, he was released from the morgue to return to death row. There, on death row, he taught and baptized by immersion eight other prisoners. He made such an impression on prison administration that they finally released him from death row and let him go among the general population.
Clyde continued to study his Bible and he took a two-year Bible course from a college in TN. He became the chaplain's right-hand man, his assistant. Eventually, after more than 28 years in prison, the State of Texas gave him a life-time parole.
On the outside, Clyde went straight to the Lubbock County Jail, one of the largest county jails in Texas and he began a chaplaincy program there. Clyde died of a heart attack in July of 1979.
It was Clyde Thompson who will go down in God's record book as one of the greatest soul winners his present generation had ever known. It was Clyde Thompson, the meanest man in the State of Texas, who literally led hundreds of men, women, boys and girls out of the streets of alcoholism, out of the streets of drugs, and to the foot of the cross of Jesus Christ. It was this man, Clyde Thompson, the meanest man in the State of Texas, who was transformed when he allowed the Word of God and the love of God to take hold of his life.
(From a sermon by David Owens, Transformed, 5/8/2012)
B. We can be thankful even during the most difficult circumstances in life. We see an especially inspiring example of a brave and thankful heart in the story behind one of the church’s thanksgiving songs #788 in our hymnal, Now Thank WE All Our God. This hymn was written during the 30 years war in Germany, in the early 1600’s. Its author was Martin Rinkart, a Lutheran preacher in the town of Eilenburg in Saxony. Now, Eilenburg was a walled city, so it became a haven for refugees seeking safety from the fighting. But soon, the city became too crowded and food was in short supply. Then, a famine hit and a terrible plague and Eilenburg became a giant morgue. In one year alone, Preacher Rinkart conducted funerals for 4,500 people, including his own wife. The war dragged on; the suffering continued. Yet through it all, he never lost courage or faith and even during the darkest days of Eilenburg’s agony, he was a...
