"The intensive care waiting room is a different world. No one is a stranger. They help one another. They grieve with one another and shed tears of joy together. There is no distinction of race or class. Vanity and pretense vanish. Everything focuses on the next doctor’s report or the next telephone call. Here in this anxious stillness it becomes clear that loving someone else is what life is all about. Why does it take the intensive care waiting room to teach us to forget our irritations and love one another?" (Herb Miller. Actions Speak Louder Than Verbs. Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1989, p. 71). It is our irritations and the way that we insulate ourselves as we pass by on the o...
