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The doctor who signed her death certificate and I crossed paths in the driveway. We recognized one another from the few times that our visits to the house had coincided. I hadn’t been a pastor for more than about a year and I remember thinking the first time I’d seen the doctor arrive with her medical bag, “at least she has some real pain medication in there.” All I had in my bag was a bible and my tiny, little communion kit. Just some old wine and a few stale wafers. I envied the doctor with her knowledge, her pills, her medicine and her skills. The doctor sighed, “Oh thank-God you’re here! They’re a real mess in there.” As I stood there, wondering what to say to that, I remember wishing the doctor had something in her bag of tricks that could give me the courage to enter the house, I felt like a fool. What was I supposed to do?

This wasn’t my first visit. A parishioner had called me just a few months earlier, “Could I go and visit a friend of hers who was dying; cancer it won’t be long now. She is being cared for at home; she wants to die at home. She used to go to church and now as the end draws near, she wants to reconnect.” Would I please go and see her.”

I knew I was out of my depth from the moment I hung up the phone. I thought this is it. This is the real stuff of being a pastor. This is where they discover that I don’t have what it takes to do this job. Leading worship, preaching, and teaching is one thing, this, this is something entirely different. But the parishioner was insistent, her friend, let’s call her Anna, her friend Anna, you’ll never guess she was once a Lutheran; yes she went to Sunday School, Confirmation, had her kids baptized and even taught Sunday School. But since they moved to Newmarket they had fallen out of the habit of going to church. There wasn’t a Lutheran church in Newmarket when they first moved here some ten, or was it twenty years ago.  “Anyway Pastor, she really needs to get close to God right now, so I told her you would come; you will go and see her won’t you, I know she’s not a member, but she really needs to get things in order before she goes.”

Standing there in the driveway feeling like a fool, I said good-bye to the doctor and tried to get myself to go inside.The black van in the driveway signaled the presence of the funeral home; there to collect the body. Her husband welcomed me at the door, fell into my arms and said only, “It is almost finished, they’ll be gone soon.” Continue reading →