Stretcher Bearers

It’s hard for me to imagine. Although I have witnessed it repeatedly, it is hard for me to visualize myself in the situation. It happens too often, and too often I don’t have a good solution.

As a Police Chaplain I am frequently called to a home, workplace or accident scene where someone has unexpectedly died. Sometimes I have to tell a surviving family member what happened.

It is always painful duty. Sometimes the difficult gets harder.

I always ask if I can phone a minister or someone from the survivor’s church to come be with him or her. I haven’t kept a record, but it seems like about 70% of the time, there is absolutely no church connection.

We also want to help contact another family member or friend to be with them before we leave. Usually someone can be there in a few minutes. But there are those occasions when the survivor has no one to call.

I remember one woman in her late 20’s who had no one to call when I told her that her father died several states away. The lieutenant who was with me and I both offered to stay as long as she wanted, but she refused. She asked us to leave.

Another time I told a woman her grown son had committed suicide in another state. She told me she had recently moved to the area. She had no family within four hours, no friends and didn’t know anyone in her apartment complex. She finally phoned a friend from work who did not arrive for 45 minutes.

Reflecting on that caused me to recall Michael Slater’s book Becoming a Stretcher Bearer, published in 1989 by Gospel Light Publishing. The idea of the book is based on an event from the life of Jesus.

“Some men came carrying a paralytic on a mat and tried to take him into the house to lay him before Jesus. When they could not find a way to do this because of the crowd, they went up on the roof and lowered him on his mat through the tiles into the middle of the crowd, right in front of Jesus.” (Luke 5:18-19)

The paralyzed man was carried by friends to Jesus. They were good enough friends to understand his needs and find a way to meet them.

We don’t know how many there were, but Mr. Slater assumes four; one for each corner of the stretcher. Mr. Slater then asks two probing questions. Who can you trust to carry your stretcher? Whose stretcher are you carrying?

If something happened, if a Chaplain knocked on your door, if you lost your job, if your house flooded, if you were diagnosed with a terrible disease – who could you call to carry your stretcher?

The best way to develop those relationships is to carry someone else’s stretcher.