Tom McMahon shares what he has learned in the 15 years of life with a disabled son in a truly wonderful, makes the whole blogging thing worthwile kind of post.
One of the things he learned is that "Everybody will have a story. And Yours is not the worst story." So I'm telling you the story of why I visit people in the hospital. It's actually not a sad or bad story -- it has a very happy, ongoingly happy ending, but at the time I didn't know how the story would turn out.
When my daughter was three months old, she had to have an operation to correct a coarctation of the aorta. She spent about a week in the hospital. That was a very difficult time, and a big help to getting through it was all the people who took the time to come visit us in the hospital. And I'm not taking about just family. There were a couple of close friends from work, but we got a lot of visitors from our church, and people all over the area were praying for her. I ran into our pastor and a couple of elders in the elevator of the parking garage after I dropped my wife and daughter off -- they were there that fast and my first thought on seeing them was I wonder who they are visiting? Most of our visitors came after work, and we often had so many we had to move to a public area. It really helped to have people to encourage us, to share with us, and to just pass the time that crawls by in the hospital with us. Since we know what it means to have visitors, we try to visit people we know in the hospital -- we aren't always successful, and we could do a lot better. So far not one person hasn't been happy to see us, and not one hasn't said to us "You didn't have to come." No, we didn't have to, we wanted to.
