‘Is this you for the rest of the day,’ I asked.
‘For the rest the week,’ he replied, eyes fixed on the metal doors.
‘I hope it all works out well for you,’ I said.
He nodded a thanks as the doors opened.
It was one of those moments you get from time to time as a patient in the Beatson. A few words, never meet again, and yet souls touch. Maybe it’s the sharing of one of the deepest experiences in life, the stripping away of all the resources you have depended on in the past, your life in other people’s hands, the reality of your basic fragility. We are faced with this in the Bible. It begins by telling us we are ‘dust’, a ‘breath’, insubstantial, and now that painful awareness has found a place deep within your psyche. But even in the fleeting glances and smalltalk and quiet anxiety of a cancer hospital there is always Someone to think of whose presence fills the universe. He was fragile to the point of death and Has gone before us through that darkness to prepare a place for those whose souls He has touched.
Dust, a breath we may be but He will always be our substantial hope.
