By Patricia L. Miller
Policemen shuffled in with a 7-year-old, a fragile slip of a girl,
shackled and handcuffed, and hurriedly took her through the emergency
room where I worked as a registrar. The policemen towered above
the child, numb with fright, as they executed their way through
the stretchers on which lay the sick and hurting. They moved past
the technicians, doctors, nurses and aides to take her to the outpatient
psychiatric evaluation unit in the back of ER. I learned her "crime"
was being "uncontrollable" at home.
My
heart and mind screamed silently, Lord, she’s only 7 years
old!
Two nights earlier, the scene had been the same except it was a
9-year-old boy. That youngster hadn’t been numb with fright.
The obscenities from his mouth pierced above the clamor and commotion
of my busy workplace.
How did he learn such words at his young age? I wondered.
In the cubicle next to this young child lay a 13-year-old who had
eaten a tremendous amount of weeds to bring on hallucinating highs.
Charcoal powder, given to her by the field medics trying to induce
vomiting to save her life, still lingered around her lips. The ER
nurses and doctors were frantically trying to keep her alive, as
she whimpered, "Mommy, Mommy, where are you? Help me, Mommy."
No one knew where Mommy was.
I silently prayed — silently, because praying out loud to
Jesus was against the rules.
Day after day, night after night, the emergency rooms of our nation
are bombarded with such scenes. Since the banning of prayer in public
schools in 1962, statistics show that child abuse is up 2,300 percent;
teen suicide, 450 percent; illegal drug use, 6,000 percent; divorces,
350 percent.1
While at work in the emergency room, I had learned to stop crying
at the pain around me. But I was haunted at night by the things
I saw. I didn’t need the statistics to affirm what I already
knew: A nation without God cannot survive. At times I was so overcome
with tears on my drive home, I felt I couldn’t face going in
another day. Each day it seemed I was becoming insensitive to people
and their real needs. Even the practice of "granny dumping"
the elderly into emergency rooms for a weekend by their uncaring
relatives began to seem normal.
The cold, hard shell I put around my feelings and my mind kept
out the pain — most of the time. But inside, I felt as if I
were dying. Five years of emergency room exposure had taken its
toll.
Then God intervened.
I was taking information for registering a young woman who had
overdosed on drugs and had attempted suicide. Her mother sat before
me as I typed the information into the computer. The mother was
unkempt and bleary eyed. She had been awakened in the middle of
the night by the police to come to the hospital. She could only
speak to me in a whisper.
Hurry up, I said to myself, as she slowly gave me the information.
My impatience was raw as I finished the report and jumped to the
machine to copy the medical cards. That’s when God stopped
me — at the copy machine. He spoke to my heart so clearly:
"You didn’t even look at her." He repeated it, gently:
"You didn’t even look at her."
I felt His grief for her and for her daughter and bowed my head.
"I’m sorry, Lord. I am so sorry," I said.
I sat down in front of the distraught woman and covered her hands
with mine. I looked into her eyes with all the love that God could
flood through me and said, "I care. Don’t give up."
She wept and wept. She poured her heart out to me about the years
of dealing with a rebellious daughter as a single mom. Finally,
she looked up and thanked me. Me … the coldhearted one with
no feelings.
Until she showed up — and God.
My attitude changed that night. My Jesus came right into the workplace
in spite of rules that tried to keep Him out. He came in to set
me free to care again. He gave himself to that woman through me.
My God, who so loved the world, broke that self-imposed barrier
around my heart. Now He could reach out, not only to me in my pain,
but to a lost and hurting woman.
I often think of a quote by Hubert Humphrey as I look back on those
years I spent in the emergency room: "It was once said that
the moral test of government is how that government treats those
who are in the dawn of life, the children; those who are in the
twilight of life, the elderly; and those who are in the shadows
of life — the sick, the needy and the handicapped."
I am now director of a maternity home for women in crisis pregnancies.
I still hear heartrending stories of lives lived without Christ.
But now, thanks to God’s intervention in the emergency room,
I can reach out to them with a caring heart.
Even though our laws are making it more difficult to witness about
Jesus to others, I know He is with me. Our government might fail
the moral test that Hubert Humphrey wrote about more than 20 years
ago, but we don’t have to. We can reach beyond the law and
touch one more lost and hurting soul.
1U.S. Department of Health and Human Services; National Center
for Health Statistics; National Institute on Drug Abuse and U.S.
Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census.
Patricia L. Miller, 59, is director of Jubilee
House for women in crisis pregnancies and also director of public
relations at Fountain of Life Center (Assemblies of God) in Burlington,
N.J., where Paul J. Graban is pastor. She plans to give her prize
money to her church’s new Family Life Center. "We’ve
been encouraged to use what’s in our hands," she says.
"I was too busy to take on extra jobs, but God found a way
for me to do more."
