Small Miracles in a Hospital Corridor
I arrived at the VA Medical Center office that August morning just after 7:30 and glanced at the sticky note full of names I carried with me like a map. I always take a few quiet minutes to center myself before rounds and to check in with the patients who become, in a way, my congregation. Lord, let me see you work in one small way today.
Breakfast meant walking through the dining rooms to trade jokes and nicknames with long-term residents who loved a predictable routine. Their banter is a kind of medicine: “Hey, Padre, what are you doing up so early?” “Pastor, do you want my yogurt?” “Chaplain, I woke up on the wrong side of the bed.”
When faces were missing from the usual tables, my feet found the hospice ward like a magnet. I stopped at Steve’s room first because some days the heart knows before the chart does. “Good morning, Steve! It’s Chaplain David.”
Steve had been a fixture in the ward for years, the sort of man who carried both a history and a weight from his time in Vietnam. He was largely paralyzed and wrestled with moral injury, the quiet wreckage that follows impossible choices. He had relied on faith to get through each sunrise.
We had rituals: a trip to the canteen for a Dr Pepper and long sat-in-sunshine silences that felt like prayer without words. That morning the pauses were longer than usual and his breaths came slow and thin. I took his hand, sung “Amazing Grace” to him, and prayed aloud for peace.
“Jesus, thank you for Steve’s life. Will you wrap your arms around his spirit now and carry him to an eternity with you?” When I opened my eyes, he was gone. The nurse and doctor confirmed what I already felt; a life had slipped into whatever comes next, and I sat with the ache.
Grief is part of hospice work, but it never becomes routine. I needed to be alone for a few minutes, then leaned on a fellow chaplain for a steadying conversation later. We teach each other how to grieve and how to keep showing up.
New arrivals come in with different kinds of storms, and I make a point to meet them, even when they walk away. One man from the acute mental health ward told me he had been drinking and was having suicidal thoughts, then left without a word. Sometimes the first encounter is simply a seed planted.
That memory took me back to one of my earliest, roughest introductions here—a patient who screamed and slammed the door on me. When I mentioned that I was a veteran, something changed; he began to open up. Trust can start with a shared uniform, or with persistence and patience.
On the geriatric psychiatry unit I met resistance again. “Good morning! It’s Chaplain David. How are you doing today?” I asked, and the man in bed replied, “I don’t want to talk to you,” the man in bed shouted. “Get out of here!”
Not everyone is ready, and some days the work is simply to refuse to take offense and to keep offering presence. I walked the dayroom and found a resident who asked to pray, and that brief connection steadied us both. Small moments stack up into a day that matters.
After lunch Chris knocked on my office door; he was in rehab and in his mid-thirties, one of the younger veterans trying to put a life back together. He wanted to talk after I spoke about moral injury in his group, and he had questions about faith and forgiveness. “Have you ever heard the story of the prodigal son?” I asked.
Chris had not, and as I told the story his face opened like a window. “You can’t hear this story and not be moved!” he said. We talked about who he needed to forgive. “Who do you need to forgive?” I asked him. “I need to forgive myself,” he said. “Who else?” I asked.
He named pilots, commanders, the system that put him in impossible spots, and we prayed together for the beginnings of healing. He left with a softer jaw and a promise to think on what we had said: “You’ve given me a lot to think about,” he told me before he left. “Thank you, Chaplain David.”
By the end of the day I had sat with endings and with the fragile sprouts of new beginnings, and I thought back to my morning prayer. Sometimes God’s work looks like a quiet exit from this life, and sometimes it looks like a man choosing to forgive himself for the first time. I never asked for only one small work and I rarely get only one.