Showing up makes God’s love tangible when people need it most.
My first deathbed visit as a pastor was with a person I’d never met. On the drive over, I wondered what I would say and if I’d be able to keep my emotions in check. But, primarily, I felt grateful that I would not be ministering on my own. I was apprenticing an older priest at the time; she was an experienced pastor and I a self-conscious twenty-something. She’d planned to visit a dying woman in a nursing home that afternoon, and she invited me to join her.
At the woman’s bedside, we prayed a short liturgy for the time of death from The Book of Common Prayer. My mentor graciously delegated a few of the prayers and readings to me, but my main job in being there was to watch and learn. Neither of us knew the woman who was approaching her last breaths—we came at the request of her daughters—but my mentor greeted her warmly and confidently. I saw how she gently held and anointed the frail, failing hands. I noticed her fight back tears.
It was a fairly unsensational visit. The woman and her family were our only congregation. But I left deeply humbled that we were invited into such a sacred space.
Competencies of the Call
Pastors, for better or worse, have a backstage pass to others’ most profound experiences. We do not trade in worldly power or influence, but we are given the holy privilege of shepherding people through the thresholds of life. In the musical Hamilton, a young politician dreams of being “in the room where it happens.” Ours is a different room: the room where birth, death, marriage, divorce, crisis, illness, and bereavement happen.
This calling necessarily shapes our competencies. Pastors, especially young pastors like me, need to learn much more than how to preach ...
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