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Today’s Gospel Message
“When I was hungry you gave me food. When I was thirsty you gave me drink. When I was naked you gave me clothes. When I was imprisoned you visited me.”
Notice that Jesus broke the parallel symmetric responses there. The expected counter to imprisonment is freedom. The admonition could have been, “When I was imprisoned, you freed me.” He doesn’t ask us to do that. He asks us to visit. That difference speaks volumes about our relationship with God and our fellow man. Overturn hunger, thirst and the vulnerability of nakedness if you can, but most of all, visit those who are imprisoned.
Who among us is not imprisoned? I find more and more of my friends imprisoned by our system of medical care. I can’t free them, although I would like to. I can visit them, or at least visit with them.
Published in General
Freeing prisoners only makes sense if they’re unjustly imprisoned. Visiting those who are justly imprisoned is merciful, yes, but it might also have the effect of moving an inmate to amend their life, which would be the greatest gift.
That reading today got my attention because I’ve recently been thinking quite a lot about prisoners . Thinking Lawfare. How exactly does one visit them. What’s the procedure? Can a random person’s visit make a difference ? Who decides who gets visits. I guess I’ll have to do a search and put out some feelers locally.
It must be acutely frustrating to sit by the side of a friend who is not getting the care he or she needs when the nature of the care needed is so obvious to you.
My husband has been dealing with some health issues this past two years, and I’m usually, as the old timers used to say, fit to be tied.
The health care “system” has too many moving parts now and very little executive leadership. At its peak of excellence twenty years ago, everyone always seemed to be on the same page. There was a sense of urgency and a dedication that I just don’t see these days.
Executives are really important in any organization. They provide a simply worded statement of the organization’s important goal, and then they reinforce the importance of that goal with every word they say and every step they take.
When people have a clear goal, their actions are guided by it. They do things automatically like check their work and check their assumptions because meeting the goal is the most important thing–not getting out of work early, not avoiding work, not saving money, not protecting or stroking their ego. Everyone is focused on the goal.
I see no signs of management’s presence anywhere I go in the health care “system.” I see a lot of competent, well-meaning, well-educated people but no management.
Management has seemingly been replaced by bureaucracy, to a large extent.
Also, Hebrews 13: 3 says: Remember those who are in prison, as though in prison with them, and those who are mistreated, since you also are in the body.
Reading these powerful words spurred me for a time to ask what the modern equivalent of Christians in prison would be, and to find information on persecuted believers and pray for them. At least it was a start–I certainly couldn’t brag about my follow-through.
I’ve heard that prisons at the time of the New Testament didn’t have a staff who would bring you three meals a day and release you into a courtyard for outdoor time. No, if you were going to eat, family and friends brought you food as well as basic supplies. It was stingy and miserable.
The other group I think about: lonely older people isolated at home or in care facilities.
There is no button on this website that I can push that would express how much I agree with you. Your words about the frustration I feel trying to help friends and family navigate our so called healthcare system are spot on. That first sentence you wrote makes the many hours I have struggled in the past few weeks worth every bit of meager effort I took.
About three months ago, a friend died that I had been trying to help. He was having episodes where his heart rate would drop down to 20 for thirty minutes or more and he would nearly pass out. I asked him how he knew that his heart rate was so slow and he said that his Apple watch alerted him. I told him he needed a pacemaker which is a fairly simple thing to obtain. I went with him to his cardiologist. She tried to dismiss his symptoms by saying you can’t rely on an Apple watch to monitor your heart rate. So she set him up for a holter monitor which took a few weeks to be obtained and then after the monitor proved that he was indeed having severe episodes of bradycardia she sent him to an interventional cardiologist for a cardiac catheterization and then pacemaker placement. He died in his sleep two days before he was scheduled for a simple pacemaker placement.
Our system is very broken.
Oh My. That is so sad.
I’m so sorry for your loss – what a tragic story. And infuriating.
This is off-topic from the OP, but I’ll mention it anyway since we’ve gone in this direction: My late husband and I moved to our current home in 2010. We live in a charming little town about 40 minutes away from the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, MN. We didn’t move here because of that, though my husband had had bypass surgery years before we moved. Shortly after moving here, he experienced unusual tiredness and went to the local Mayo Clinic satellite, and was then sent to Rochester, where he was put under the care of a brilliant cardiologist. Unlike so many people, our experiences with healthcare were all very positive. I have no complaints. I am certain that I would have become a widow much sooner if we had not moved here and gotten under this cardiologist’s care. He was so responsive and so personally engaged in the 11 years he cared for my husband. One of the last times I saw the cardiologist, he told me that he could not now care for patients the way he had cared for my husband. Mayo now wanted him to see a patient once, make a diagnosis, and then from that point on the patient would see a nurse practitioner. That’s not how it was for my husband – we always saw the cardiologist, he was the one who ordered various tests, and he gave us his phone number so I could text him with any concerns or questions and to keep him updated. He arranged for my husband’s frequent hospitalizations and always checked whether the cardiology team at the hospital was going to be an effective one – if not, he advised us to not go in. Anyway, he was clearly frustrated. He said to me, “You want to know what’s wrong with healthcare? Look at this,” and he showed me a graph on his phone showing the incredible rise of “administrators” relative to the number of doctors. Obviously that graph shows the result of underlying conditions, but I got the point. I also realized that there is a lot of subjectivity in health care – we had great results because we had a great doctor. He was the one who made my husband’s care effective – not the system.
I would say exactly the same thing about my husband’s care.
My computer runs on Windows 11, and it has a recovery feature by which I can pick a date and restore my computer to exactly what it was on that date. If I could, I would hit such a button for healthcare that would restore whatever it was before the ObamaCare tsunami hit it.
In 2007, I read a fantastic book by Regina Herzlinger: Who Killed Health Care? In it, she wrote that ObamaCare would not only not fix what was broken but only add to the problems. I think of her every day these days. She accurately predicted this sad state of affairs.
Of course, in order to go back, we’d have to recall all of our retired doctors for a short stint. But that may be more doable than it seems. When the United States entered World War II, the military drafted every young doctor in the country, which meant that all of the doctors who had retired were pressed into service in local communities for the duration of the war. :) :)