The Great Physician

Just As I Am

Just a few months before I received my M.D. from Johns Hopkins, I sat in the sumptuous office of the great Surgeon-in-Chief up at the world famous Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center, the ivory tower high above upper New York City. Across the desk from me sat the famous man.

The great man leaned forward and looked at me intently.

“Dr. Dombroff, in thirty or forty years, what do you want to have accomplished,” he asked.

“I want to look back and be able to say that I changed someone’s life in a profound way for the better that would not have happened had I not been passing through their life at that moment,” I answered. I really didn’t know exactly what I meant by this at the time and uncharacteristically blurted it out

These days, as a nursing home and hospice chaplain, I tend to make rounds in a way which is very similar to my years in clinical medicine and surgery at the great hospitals of the world. I have certain patients who are on my list to see

The long and the short of this was that after chatting with a certain young man with metastatic liver cancer, I prayed with him, something he had never done in his life. I then asked him if he would like to get things “right with God.” He said he would and I guided him to a saving knowledge and confession of Jesus Christ of Nazareth. We took the Lord’s Supper together at his bedside, we hugged each other, I congratulated him, and I told him I would see him next weekend. I will always remember that he smiled an amazing little sly grin as I left the room.

I have found that when people are at the precipice of death, they are often freed from the bondage to traditions and cultural inhibitions learned from family, communities, and life experiences. In short, they are desperate for the meaning of their lives and all the bankrupt philosophies of man that they may have been taught growing up, often don’t amount to a hill ‘beans and they seem to develop a sixth sense for Truth. That’s where the Gospel comes in.

This young fellow was no different and like many others, I have been privileged, as an Ambassador for Christ, to bring them to the only source of true peace and meaning in their lives, the living God-Man, Jesus of Nazareth.

Truly, at that moment, as I left his room, in my spirit, I could hear the angels singing in the throne room of God. I love that sound. I’ve heard it many times.

Likewise, I say unto you, there is joy in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner that repenteth.

Luke 15:10

The following Sunday, as I was making my rounds, I entered this young fellow’s room, and as I entered I exclaimed, “Hi ya, Brother, Chaplain Rock here!”

He lay in his bed comatose, surrounded by family, a sister and a brother. They looked up at me, with initial surprise, but then with welcoming grins, similar to the amazing smile I remembered the young man had given me the week earlier.

His sister came up to me and I was half afraid that I was going to get scolded for something. That’s an occupational hazard of getting into so much trouble in life.

She took my hand and said: “Chaplain Rock, my brother told me about you praying with him and we are very grateful. We were raised Jewish, but we’re not religious people. Thank you so much, it meant a lot to him. He’s in a coma and he’s going now.”

I hugged her and walked slowly around to the right side of his bed. This was the side I always ministered from. It was an old habit because we surgeons always do our best work from the patient’s right side of the operating table.

I took His hand and anointed his forehead with oil. He was semi-comatose and his breathing was stertorous. I prayed out loud, in the natural as well as quietly in tongues, for when we pray over someone in tongues we pray the “perfect will of God” in their lives.

We joined hands around his bed and prayed as well. They knew he was at the end of his painful journey. I assured them truthfully that their brother would be in Heaven with the Lord forever. We had settled that.

I am the resurrection, and the life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live:

John 11:25

Just before leaving, I leaned way over the young man’s right ear, without any assurance that he would hear me. I knew his spirit would hear it anyway. I kneeled down by his bedside and I sang to him one last song, my favorite:

Softly and tenderly Jesus is calling,

Calling for you and for me;

See, on the portals He’s waiting and watching,

Watching for you and for me

Come home, come home,

You who are weary, come home

Earnestly, tenderly, Jesus is calling,

Calling, O sinner, come home!

Just as I finished, he turned his head ever so slightly to me, still on my knees in prayer at his bedside, he squeezed my hand gently, and, eyes still closed, he evidenced that famous family grin I now knew so well.

Then, finally freed, he went home to be with the Lord.

I realized at that moment that I had finally fulfilled the elusive life ambition I had so unexpectedly articulated in that pretentious surgical internship interview forty years earlier in New York. The goal that had eluded me for nearly six decades. I had accomplished what I had set out to do in life, but in a way that I could never have dreamed possible as a young, hungry man in a rush. But, after all the triumphs and all the adulation, after all the Rolls Royces and Trump Tower penthouses gone, after all the gains and losses, despite all the pain and sorrow, it had been worth the trip.

Life today in the Lord is very different and transformed, radically beautiful and, above all, I do know one thing for sure:

Because He lives, I can face tomorrow.

Just as I am.