I want to change the world

Another attempted suicide.

I had started to feel as though I had attracted these young patients in the Emergency Department. No matter how hard I tried to avoid selecting them as my patients, there was always another one around the corner seemingly waiting for me to become their doctor.

She was 14.

Oh God… so young!

What could possibly have gone wrong for her to think she had no way out?

Where was God while she was giving up on herself?

Why couldn’t He come down and convince her of how loved she truly was?!

I ask these questions each time something bad happens… which, in medicine, is very often. Each patient encounter just fuels my confusion and my need for answers. Every single patient has their own bindle of pain that they carry around, waiting for someone to help lighten the load somehow. Doctors can help a little bit, but with suicide attempts, sometimes our help is similar to placing a small band-aid on a severed limb.

Sarah had enough.

Sarah wanted out.

Anyway possible.

But fortunately for her, she failed to escape from her hurt and landed in the department that night.

I couldn’t see how much help she needed at first.

Maybe this was just another teenager being rebellious, finding another way to scream out and hope to be seen.

Another bed filled in the department, filling up more of that night shift I desperately didn’t want to work.

I regretted that frustration by the end of shift.

She told me how she recently came to know Christ and felt a connection to the apostle Paul. She loved learning about his life and his zeal for a God he spent most of his younger life torturing. She felt she too had been torturing God all these years, and found hope in Paul’s salvation, knowing she too had the same chance despite her past. The difference she felt between the two of them though was that she felt she could never have such a profound impact on anyone’s life, while Paul continues to change people’s lives every day.

She felt plagued by the thought that she had no purpose.

And in that moment, I found our own connection.

She believed there was just no point in trying; that she was here by mistake and not even Paul could convince her otherwise.

I was with her for most of that night.

We spoke about love and life and the ultimate Giver of them both.

We spoke about Paul and his affliction.

We spoke about everything.

And in speaking, she smiled and opened up.

She now knew where I worked, and I invited her to visit whenever she felt overwhelmed.

But I never saw her again.

We all wish to be seen.

We want to make a difference in this temporary world, hoping that somehow that mark will be seen from the heavens.

We want to leave our mark; our signature on someone else’s heart, even if it is just one person.

But we want that mark to be a grand announcement in the skies; a significant expression of love that makes an instant and dramatic change in a constant world.

We fail to see that every expression of love can change the world of those we meet on our path.

Every smile can offer hope when things seem grim.

Every helping hand has the power to turn a person’s page to start anew.

Every little glimmer of the hope that is inside us holds the key to the change we so desperately wish to see.

“One person cannot change the world.

But you can become the world for someone.

A warm, bright, and peaceful world.

If everyone can be such a world to one person, one will become ten people, and then a hundred.

The world will be full of happy people then.”

-       Enrique Iglesias