The Doctor will see you now

“Now in Jerusalem by the Sheep Gate there is a pool with five porches. In these were many invalids. One man was there who had been ill for thirty-eight years. When Jesus saw him lying there and knew that he had been there a long time, he said to him, ‘Do you want to be made well?’” (John 5).

When my family moved to Temple in the early 60s, Dr. Jack Weinblatt became our family physician. His office was three blocks from First Christian Church in a residential neighborhood. Everyone came to Dr. Weinblatt. Everyone loved Dr. Weinblatt.

(I have to share a little anecdote here: Whenever Dr. Weinblatt would use his otoscope to look into my ears for swelling, he would say, “Now, hold your hand over your other ear.” Gullible, I always would.)

At Dr. Weinblatt’s clinic there were no appointments. You just opened the door and stepped into the reception area that was the same as the waiting room. Several two-seated couches lined the room with individual chairs in the middle. The waiting room could seat about thirty people.

You walked up to a sliding glass window, gave the receptionist your name and told her your ailment. She would ask you to have a seat and wait. And you would wait. And wait. Fifteen minutes. Thirty minutes, forty-five minutes— depending on the multitude of sniff ling noses in the waiting room.

Finally, one of two doors would open to one of the two halls that led to examining rooms. “The doctor will see you now.” The examining room also doubled as another waiting room. The nurse would have you sit on the edge of an exam table, take your pulse, put a glass thermometer under your tongue and walk out of the room. And you would wait. Fifteen minutes. Twenty minutes.

When you’re sick, you don’t feel like waiting. When you’re injured, you absolutely don’t feel like waiting. When a loved one is sick or injured, waiting can be agonizing. But we are all waiting. The world is waiting. And whom the world is waiting for is the Great Physician.

There’s a book on my shelf by Donald McCall: In God’s Hand, Meditations for the Sick and Their Families.

McCall tells of stopping by the hospital one evening to visit a young patient and see how his day had been. As the door was ajar, he noticed a young doctor sitting at the bedside. McCall began to leave so as not to interrupt a consultation. The doctor turned, and beckoned Rev. McCall into the room. It was not a consultation at all. The two were eating sandwiches and talking about automobiles, a subject of mutual interest.

“That genuine expression of interest and personal concern for one person,” wrote McCall, “in a 1,000-bed hospital, probably did more for the young lad’s healing than any medicine the physician might have prescribed. It was an extension of personal care.”

A similar truth was expressed by Dr. Kenneth Berge of the Mayo Clinic: “The secret of the care of the patient is in caring for the patients.” And the secret of Christianity is caring for the world: not in a universal, general way, but as an extension of personal care.

The call of Christ is a call to be a healer; to touch an ailing world with caring as personal as that of Jesus. To care is to love, and to love is to heal. To extend empathy and presence with those who so need healing and caring is also to proclaim the Gospel: “The Doctor will see you now.”