Pastors

We have seen the young man mutilated,

The torn girl trembling by the millstream.

And meanwhile we have gone on living …

We have all had our private terror …

-T.S. Eliot, Murder in the Cathedral

I didn't know it, but I was too late.

Frank had died twenty minutes earlier, but when I arrived, all I saw were the hospital sheets, like wrinkled drapes in a house in which no one lives, lying on a disheveled and very empty bed.

I picked up the sheets anyway, as if to make sure Frank wasn't hiding beneath PROPERTY OF WEST PENN HOSPITAL. He wasn't, but lying next to the garbage can was a crumpled piece of paper. I investigated this new evidence. People don't simply disappear from hospital rooms.

"Turn the corpse over and fold the arms behind its back," the note read. Frank is dead! I realized. What a way to find my old friend. An hour ago Frank was watching "The Today Show" and sipping cold coffee. Now he is "the corpse."

Two weeks earlier I had gone to his house to give him Communion.

"This ...

You have reached the end of this Article Preview

To continue reading, subscribe to Christianity Today magazine. Subscribers have full digital access to CT Pastors articles.

Log InSubscribe

Already a CT subscriber? Log in for full digital access.