Blessed Are The Merciful

The alcohol on his breath was as stale as his manners. A hardened Vietnam vet with a serious drinking problem, he was now balanced precariously on the edge of extremely sick with probable internal bleeding. His belly was bloated and his skin a tell tale yellow.

Despite his desperate condition, he was mad as hell and letting everyone know it.

“You bitch.” He looks at me sideways through suspicious eyes and a thick scowl. The smell of old alcohol on his breath is making my stomach squeeze, and the veins in his arm do not look promising for the large bore IV access we need. I’m not sure what I’ve done to win this flattering title, but I shake it off and try to be professional.

“I’m sorry, sir, but we have to start an IV. You are pretty sick, and we need to give you some medicine.”

“You’re pathetic. Bring a man here against his will. You f-ing bitch.”

He was unconscious when he was brought in by the medics, and I find myself wishing that would’ve stuck a little longer. I remind him that we didn’t force him here, but brought him because he was passed out and a little to the left of mostly dead. The first time I told him this his eyes widened in shock and tearing up he had apologized, not realizing how sick he’d been. But that momentary wave of gratitude soon ebbed and I was back to being a B-word.

Sometimes getting a doctor to insert a central line is like getting water from a stone, so many attempts and several nurses later we still had no IV access and had each gotten an earful about our respective worthlessness. We called to the lab for a phlebotomist to draw his blood tests, but this also ended in failure after he called her a racial slur and tried to smack her, leading her to hustle out of the room in a rage.

This was the state of things when shift change mercifully ended our not so sweet relationship. I don’t know what happened to my angry little man, but our encounter sent me home thinking about the contrast between the call of Christ to be merciful and the frustration and anger I felt at being demeaned and cursed at by someone I was trying to help. He certainly did not deserve mercy!

But then I remembered that justice is something you deserve while mercy, by definition, is something you do not. God doesn’t ask me to be merciful because it’s that person’s right. He asks me to be merciful because He was merciful to me. And I didn’t deserve it either.