No funerals!
For the first time in 2004 I will not be officiating at a funeral this week! Yet I did receive a call on Tuesday from a woman in the community whose mother-in-law is dying of cancer. She is only expected to live for two to three weeks. I visited with her Tuesday afternoon in the hospital. This will be the second terminally ill person I walk this path with in less than a year.

What do you say to an elderly woman who is dying? I enjoy sitting and listening, holding and crying, praying and grieving. I have walked into the rooms of terminal patients who are being told the “good news,” encouraged to say a prayer. Is this what I am to seek to do as a pastor?

As I wrestle with my calling and especially in moments of being at the bedside of a terminally ill person, my evangelical upbringing screams at me to share the gospel and make sure they are saved before they die. Yet I know I can’t control them or their response. I feel it is far more important to develop a relationship with this person, to weep with them, to mourn with them, to pray for them. I try to enter into conversations with them about their current experience. I try to let them know I love them. I try to communicate the love of Jesus to them through my words and actions. I desire for them to know Jesus Christ and to know that he is the way, the truth, and the life. But ultimately I know that I am not responsible for getting them there.

Brian McLaren talked about counting conversations rather than conversions. I want this woman and all the other terminally ill that I walk this path with and their families to know that I am their friend first regardless of their belief. I care about them because they are persons made in the image of God. I am building a relationship with them to get to know them, to love them, to minister in every way I can to them, not solely to convert them. If conversion happens great, but too often evangelicals treat that as the one and only goal of ministering to the terminally ill.