God

He didn't want to believe in God.
Couldn't.
Not after his wife died
All those years ago.
She was perfectly blameless.
It didn't make sense
that such a being of beauty
would be taken so young. 
So God had no right to him.
Had no place in his mindset.
And there he was,
having faced his own harrowing health ordeal,
alive—
and telling me he didn't care about God.
How he was agnostic
or something. 
And all this talk about the God 
he did not believe in 
made him angrier.
So I told him that 
we were talking an awful lot
about someone he 
did not believe in. 
I asked him
to give God a rest.
We decided that 
God would 
sit in the chair next to me. 
And then he told me 
about all the things 
that mattered to him.
Such sweet things. 
And though he
did not want to acknowledge God,
He certainly was
sitting next to me.
He was there
because He was with me. 
Sometimes people
don't understand that. 
They want me
to have done something holy
in the encounter.
Holier than what
they think I did—
which is nothing to them.
Holy things
like read a Psalm,
Or debate about
The reasons he should believe
in Jesus Christ.
That the absence of 
prayer
or the Bible
means the absence of God
in that room.
Not to me.
My words of hope
to the patient were prayers.
Though he may not
have recognized it.
And the Holy Spirit was with me
in the chair.
So the very act of 
intentionally not talking 
about God
made God more present. 
And I wondered if the patient 
felt Him too.