I should stop here and explain.
As an EMT, the very first job is to establish "ABC's" for any patient- Airway, Breathing and Circulation. Nothing else matters until those are dealt with. And, yes, I was a Christian at the time, and this was NOT the time to pray. There are some folks who will absolutely bristle at that last statement, and I understand why they would. Most of those people haven't been faced with a life/death situation (be thankful) and really don't understand the mindset that is required here- but, trust me when I tell you that this is the right and proper thing to do. I am there to be an active instrument to render aid at the time it is needed in a real and physical way, and I must let others attend to the other things.
It was immediately apparent that the child had suffered potentially fatal head trauma, so establishing airway was going to be a challenge. He had a neck laceration that was down to his trachea, so that was going to have to do, and I inserted a tube into it to provide that airway. His blood pressure was very low, but once the tube was in, it got a bit better. Circulation didn't seem to be a problem here. He stabilized very quickly, so we taped the tracheotomy tube and got him loaded into a different ambulance and started transport. The whole operation took about 4 minutes to do, and the entire time, his parents were crying and praying fervently and out loud. Being that the boy was obviously more critical than anyone else, he went first and his parents were to go later. I walked over to the parents, and put my hand on the shoulder of the father and told him, "I will be praying for your boy." I then attended to the other patients as needed, and we left after about 20 minutes on another call. I said nothing more to the parents, but I did pray for the boy.
The reason that I am telling you this is to illustrate something that might not be obvious to you. What I am trying to illustrate is that there is a time to provide aid to people in a more passive form and there are times to provide aid in more active forms. I am not saying that prayer is "passive" by any means, but I am saying that attending to the boys injuries because I had a certain skill set was more active than prayer was at that moment. Moreover, the aid that I rendered was no less valid and appropriate than the others being rendered at that same time, but my part to play was different.
In the Bible, Jesus performed both passive and active rendering of aid a number of times- feeding the 5,000; telling the woman at the well to go and sin no more; raising Lazarus; showing the Disciples how to be fishers of men, etc. There was no single method here, and even though Jesus had the ability to just do whatever He wanted to in the way He wanted to do it, He demonstrated that our dealings with others can be done in any number of ways, and there is no right or wrong, necessarily-
BUT: Aid is to be rendered. Period. You don't just stand by and do nothing.
Let's put this into a political perspective for a minute: The Left and the Right have seemingly very different ways of rendering aid from a governmental perspective. The current mainstream media would have you believe that the Left is the more compassionate and forward thinking and the Right is more about casting everything into class warfare and warmongering. The counter media would have you believe that the Left is espousing nothing but a "nanny state" where everything is just a wanted hand-out and rights and liberty are being removed day and night and the Right has the corner on common sense and are the only ones capable of restoring order to the "new" chaos.
I, personally, believe that both the above points of view are complete bullshit. The chaos is not new and the arguments are even older than the "chaos" is.
What I believe is that both viewpoints have valid points and can co-exist nicely, just as my illustration of the EMT story demonstrates. Further, I don't believe for one, hot second that the Left intends to strip us of liberty and give everything away, and the Right is not interested in warmongering and class warfare. The reasons that these ideas exist in the first place is because - well - people don't want to think. It's way easier to just say that anyone who doesn't agree with you is stupid or evil, because to do the opposite of that is to actually acknowledge that no one person can know everything. Not even you.
Imagine in my above scenario if I had decided that the most important thing was to neither pray with the parents nor attend to my patient- the most important thing was traffic control!!! Only I know how!! We need to keep these other cars away so no one else gets hurt! And, while that is a true statement, the idea that only I could do that is ridiculous. It is further ridiculous to assume that I was the only EMT on scene to do what needed to be done to establish that airway (there were another 7 EMTs there) but I was first on scene and I knew what to do, so I did it. I also did not castigate those that were taking care of traffic control, praying with the parents, working with other patients and thought they were less important. I just focused on the task at hand and did what I was required to do. It would have been far simpler to have taken up those ideas and render no aid at all and just gone and gotten a beer instead- and I could have sat there and ridiculed all those people for making a big fuss in the first place. Instead, I got bloody and messy and I didn't think about it.
I've heard recently from people who have said they don't understand how a devout Christian could be a liberal. I've heard the other side, too- "Jesus would have been a Democrat" - and both of those opinions are garbage at their core. The people who say this are too tightly wrapped up in a pre-misconception (a new word that I hope will catch on) that anthropomorphizes the very notion of God into some kind of package that squares Him with the status-quo as provided by either the mainstream or counter media. God would be neither on today's Right or Left or even in the middle (where I consider myself to be) - and we would do well to remember that, because when we try to Liberal-ize or Conservative-ize or Moderate-ize God in this fashion, what we are really trying to say is that our ideas line up with God, and therefore we are more "godly" than the ones who don't believe as we do. THAT is a very, very dangerous place to go and is probably one of the slipperiest slopes you could even be on. Nothing could be further from the Truth.
So- the very next time you decide that God is somehow in or cares about American politics (or anyone else's for that matter) think again. God does not care if it's Trump or Clinton in 2016; He doesn't care about your stances on welfare, abortion or gay marriage. Yeah- that's right- what He cares about is YOU and how YOU treat others and how you can align your life to what He has intended for you, plain and simple. The rest of those things mean nothing compared this immutable fact. If the ideals that you hold to are held in such a way that it forces others away from redemption and a life in Christ, then you are in the WRONG and you should stop immediately- and a lot of times this means to shut your damned pie hole and keep your opinions to yourself. (It's even ok to not have an opinion on something.) I don't want to turn this blog into me giving a testimony and evangelizing; I do, however, want to give a possible idea on what it means to critically think through something.
And- here's the epilogue to the story. The child didn't make it- he died before reaching the hospital due to his injuries, despite my efforts and the efforts of others. It just broke my heart when I found out- but here's the deal: that doesn't change the fact that I did my job and I wouldn't change a darned thing about what I did or how I did it. The fact that the boy died had nothing to do with me- it had to do with the accident and the trauma, and those were things out of my control. What I do know is that the parents told the EMTs who did get to the hospital with other patients that they really appreciated everyone's efforts for their boy, and they took comfort in knowing that everything that could have been done was done. And, that right there- is the reason to see all sides of the equation.
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