This week, I walked into a hospital room that did not feel anything like the hospital room I had spent several days in last week.

Last week, I spent several days in the maternity ward. It was a room full of blessing and joy, permeated with the energy of new life. I was also in a cemetery, and I wrote about the contrast between them.

This week, I went to say final prayers with someone in the hospital who is sadly nearing the end of life. Since then, he has been transferred to hospice. The family has accepted reality, and now they are trying to make him comfortable, at peace, and surrounded by love.

As I walked out, with a heavy heart from seeing a once vibrant person so helpless, I thought about what I wrote last week how a hospital is a place of life. The room did not feel alive at all. And of course, people also die in hospitals. I have stood at many, many hospital bedsides as a life was slipping away.

So what makes a hospital a place of life?

It’s not because everyone who goes there survives.

It’s because of WHY people go there. The ultimate reason why every person goes to a hospital is to preserve and extend life.

People go to a hospital because they are trying to heal. They go because they want treatment, strength, recovery, or at least a chance. So even when the outcome is not what we hoped for, the purpose of the place is still life.

A hospice could not be more different. Hospice is not about fighting for a cure. It’s about dignity, comfort and peace. It’s about helping a person and a family walk through the last chapter with gentleness.

Both are in medical settings, but there is a world of difference between them: Why you went there?

That word, why, has been sitting with me all week.

There is a line that has become especially powerful and even more famous since Oct. 7th: “He who has a why can bear almost any how.” It was made famous by Viktor Frankl, a Holocaust survivor, who watched how different people did, or didn’t, survive the terrible suffering of the camps.

These........

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