Visiting Kirk

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When I was six years old, my dad took me to visit a man in the hospital whose name was Kirk. Kirk was one of Dad’s closest friends. They had a Paul and Timothy kind of brotherhood, where Kirk had broken free from a stormy past and become one of Dad’s greatest mentors in the gospel.

But Kirk had Stage 4 brain cancer. Dad, of course, knew this, but I did not. I was on a Go To Work With Dad Date, and because Dad is a pastor, this often meant visiting people in hospitals or nursing homes. Riding on the interstate up to one of the big hospitals in the city was so exciting I probably had trouble sleeping the night before. 

I remember standing against the wall in Kirk’s room. His family was there, talking, crying, sometimes crying and laughing both. Kirk was lying flat under a white blanket with his head back and eyes closed. I had never seen anyone in this state before, and I watched carefully as a nurse held a little sponge of water to his mouth to try to get him to drink. He was not responsive. But my dad knew Kirk, and he had brought a CD player which he plugged in next to the bed. When he clicked it on and started playing Brian Doerksen’s worship album, I saw Kirk’s foot nod back and forth beneath the sheets.

Before I left that day, I remember Dad drawing me closer in toward Kirk’s bedside to see him. This was probably a scary thing to do. Thinking back on it, most parents probably would not have taken their little girl to the ICU room of a dying man who is not her own grandpa in the first place. We tend to safeguard our children from scenes like these—from illness and death and patients with tubes up their noses.

But my dad never apologized for this experience, as if he had somehow harmed my little eyes for seeing it. Seeing Kirk helped me understand how his own daughter felt when, a week or so later, he did pass away. I was too little to fully shoulder the weight of death, but I knew enough to weep with them. 

It wasn’t unusual for Dad to take us kids to visit people. There were nursing homes and living rooms and funeral homes and waiting rooms. I learned to be comfortable in spaces where most people are not, bringing schoolbooks to the hospital with me and making up games in the foyer of the funeral parlor. This was not to make light of people’s suffering, but to bring a kid’s joy to it. I remember how folks’ faces would brighten when the six of us kids crammed into the stuffy doorway of their nursing home room at Christmastime. My parents took us so often we knew the patients by name—like Miss Krissy, whose permed hair stood straight up and Merlin, who had a long, pointed beard, black fingernails, and a certificate on his door announcing he was the champion of the nursing home’s Longest Belching Competition.

I think the Lord knew that being a pastor’s kid would prep and season me to someday be a pastor’s wife. Visiting people is woven into the fabric of Jared’s job as both a pastor and a hospital chaplain. When a chaplain walks through the door of a room, he is stepping into that family’s world as they know it.

This is where the Lord enters in. 

This is what visitation allows us to do—exactly what Christ himself did when he came to earth. “For he has visited and redeemed his people,” Zechariah said (Luke1:68, emphasis added). This word, visited, speaks in the Greek of looking, observing, or regarding someone with mercy in their suffering. In Exodus 4, the Israelites in slavery worshiped “when they heard that the Lord had visited the people of Israel and that he had seen their affliction” (Ex. 4:31).

To visit someone is to see them in their affliction. It’s to enter into their ICU room, their prison cell, or the home that feels so empty now that he is gone. It means walking into their space and sitting down, making yourself comfortable (or uncomfortable), and breathing their air. It also means throwing the windows open and letting the sweet rush of redemption wash into the room. It means playing worship music.

Really, to visit someone is to walk out the incarnation of Christ himself, who didn’t just see us in our affliction but visited us; who didn’t just visit us but healed and redeemed us from the crushing cancer of death.

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“I was sick and you visited me, I was in prison and you came to me.”
~ Matthew 25:36

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