Every night at the hospital is different. Some are busy with good old-fashioned hard work. Some nights are extremely peaceful, everyone seems to be sleeping well, and are generally doing okay. Occasionally I will have a night where it is evident that God is doing something more overt than usual. Now, to be fair, God is always doing things in our lives, but it is usually when we don’t expect it that memorable things occur. I remember years ago hearing prophet Larry Randolph say something that has always stuck with me, “In the midst of the mundane, the supernatural happens.” Often it is in the middle of the most mundane and unextraordinary things that we see God do the spectacular, the fascinating, and the life-giving. My friend Diane calls these encounters “divine appointments”. My night with a patient named Ann (not her actual name) was one such memorable time, and I want to share the story of that night and the various things God did during my Divine Appointment with Ann.
I was working in the float pool at the time, which is a lot like being a substitute nurse for whatever floor has a nurse call in sick, etc., and was assigned to a PCU/Telemetry floor that particular night (a lot of heart-related health problems and people not well enough to be on a normal floor but not sick enough for the ICU). Ann was one of my patients that night. She was in her 70’s, if I remember correctly, and she just had this really enjoyable atmosphere or aura about her. I forget how it started, but we ended up talking a bit about our lives, which then caused us to delve into a conversation about spirituality. She grew up in the Episcopal Church like I did, but somewhere along the line she moved into shamanism. I am not entirely sure why she asked me, but she asked me how to overcome fear and we began to talk about God’s love. She shared with me some different spiritual encounters she had over the years (which I always love hearing about). We even had a moment where we just stared at each other silently. And while that normally would be really strange to do, we both just felt this unconditional love for one another and without discussing it, we both fell silent to just be in the moment with the other. The silence in sharing of love must have lasted for at least a minute, and may even have been longer, but it was profound. I’m not actually sure if I have had an encounter like that before, and I know I have not since. We didn’t need to explain it to the other and we didn’t need to even discuss what had happened because in that moment of connection and love we just knew what it was and knew the other was encountering the same thing. It was an expression of Divine Love being shared between us on a deep level.
At one point I was going to get her some pain medication for a headache she had, and given that we were already discussing things spiritual, I offered to pray for her. You might think I pray for all of my patients, and it might surprise you to hear that I don’t. There are times that I pray for them or over them without their awareness, releasing healing and life to them, but it is actually fairly rare that I directly offer to a patient to pray for them. It isn’t because I’m ashamed of my faith or because I don’t think God can help them, but in current USA work culture you have to be wise about when you put those sorts of offers out there for people, and also I am often just focused on the more physical nature of my job, so it doesn’t always come up. I commanded her headache to leave and it did, so she didn’t need the pain medication any longer—which she was happy with because she, like I, don’t prefer to use pharmaceuticals if we don’t need to.
During one of our conversations that night, I was looking in the spirit and saw a black object sticking out of her right shoulder. When I told her about what I saw, she told me she had actually seen it on her pillow earlier that night, but in the mental space she was in it hadn’t occurred to her to “vanquish it” (her term) like she normally would. I removed the black object in the spirit, and as I did this I saw God clothe her with a rainbow cloak. I didn’t honestly know what it meant, so I just shared the vision with her. Interestingly, she then told me that every morning during her morning meditations, she would pray and release life upon our government, her family, and so on, and that each morning while she would do this, she would put on what she referred to as her “spiritual raiment”. What I loved about that is that in many ways it sounds similar to what I would call putting on the “Armor of God” that is referenced in Ephesians 6:10-18. And even though she didn’t follow the Episcopal church’s version of faith at that point, she was still doing something that fairly matched it anyway.
I don’t have any profound message to share about this particular encounter or a special set of takeaways, except maybe that we need to remember to enjoy the moments in life even when they feel mundane. Because it is in the middle of those mundane moments, those times of boredom or monotony, and often when we feel the least spiritual because we aren’t praying or doing anything overtly “Godly” that He reaches into our day and causes us to encounter Him, to have moments to share His love and goodness with others, and more. And like God did with Ann and I, maybe we’ll even just share a moment of experiencing deep and wordless love for one another and Him. After all, like prophet Larry Randolph said, “In the midst of the mundane, the supernatural happens.”
