gross people

Today I spent over an hour in a tiny consult room with a family of gross people.  I'm writing that in the nicest way possible.  They were smelly and smokey and hysterical and dysfunctional.  I tried to focus on their grief and be compassionate.  I tried to see them in the ways God might see them.  I tried only breathing out of my mouth.  I tried to BE there til it was all over.  Then I limped back to the office knowing that because this is CPE it wasn't over.

Why did they bother you so much?
Where did you see yourself in that room?
Who were you to them?
How does this quote address this situation?  If you hate a person, you hate something in them that is part of yourself.  What isn't part of ourselves doesn't disturb us.  Herman Hesse


I don't know yet.  I know it isn't Christ-like, or tender, or even human.  But it is totally honest.  I will keep digging at that obstinate thing we like to call our growing edge.  And Jesus, if that was you in that room, I'll try harder to see you next time.


He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him.  He was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows, and familiar with suffering. Like one from whom men hide their faces, he was despised, and we esteemed him not.  Isaiah 53:2 and 3