What I know to be true

Gone From My Sight

I am standing upon the seashore.
A ship at my side spreads her white
sails to the morning breeze and starts
for the blue ocean. 

She is an object of beauty and strength.
I stand and watch her until at length
she hangs like a speck of white cloud
just where the sea and sky come
to mingle with each other.

Then, someone at my side says;
"There, she is gone!"

"Gone where?"
Gone from my sight. That is all.
She is just as large in mast and hull
and spar as she was when she left my side
and she is just as able to bear her
load of living freight to her destined port.
Her diminished size is in me, not in her.

And just at the moment when someone
at my side says, "There, she is gone!"
There are other eyes watching her coming,
and other voices ready to take up the glad shout;
"Here she comes!"
And that is dying.

by Henry Van Dyke, a 19th Century clergyman, educator, poet, and religious writer

Today I saw Satan.

I saw you as the elevator opened and the middle aged mother of two was wheeled unconscious past my desk. Perched there over her limp, dirty form, laughing and winking at all the nurses, as if this was a joy ride, her stretcher your limo. How could I miss you? When they handed me the paper work you stuck out like a tarantula on the breakfast table, there to spread filth , terror and confusion. The yellow piece of note paper, torn from a cursed book, bore your handwriting. I saw it! You cannot lie to me Satan because there on the paper were your words, the words you made that poor woman write:

"No more bother for my friends and family

no more tears

no more pain

no more sorrow

no more bother."

The original author of lies, I felt your pride leak out of those scrawled letters. I was shocked and disgusted to see what you had told her. My heart broke and trembled in the same instant, both weeping for your almost victim and terrified at being so near to you, you loathsome devil whose power cannot be denied. Taking my Lord's words, his promises to us, his beloved, and pretending as though you offer the same reward! Only in heaven will there be no more tears and only you Satan would dare to lie about Hell, to advertise it in such a despairingly twisted way. I folded your letter and I hid your words deep inside her medical record. If she survives this night Satan, I want her to know. I want her to know it was YOU who almost killed her, who poisoned and drugged her, who lured her to the side of the highway and left her for dead. Tucked neatly between those pages of masks you love to wear, medical terms and depression symptoms, is the proof that you were there, your ugly face drawn in chilling clarity on a yellow piece of note paper.

While you're here, while I'm staring at you across my desk, lurking there as you are at her bedside, I'd like to tell you something rather important. The dirt on her face and the still bleeding cuts on her hands mean that she has yet to be disinfected for processing. The sprawled and restless way she occupies her shabby hospital bed means that no one has posed her for rigamortis. The anxious nurses surrounding her and the multiple tubes placed in her body mean that she is not beyond repair. Wearing an arm band instead of a toe-tag, your intended victim shows her strength with each feeble breath she takes. The fact that she's here, not wrapped in a tarp in the icy vaults below means that you have lost.

Be gone Satan.

To God be the glory for the wayward sheep that was found tonight.