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Joy Snell – Ministry of Angels

More real to me became the presence of my invisible guardian and keener my susceptibility to the tender guidance.

Often I was conscious of being helped thereby to perform tasks which seemed beyond my own physical strength, and of being prevented making mistakes in my eagerness to help some poor sufferer. It seemed as though at times an impetuous movement was checked by a restraining hand laid on mine. At other times a voice seemed to whisper at my ear: “Nay, do not do that: do this”, and I would immediately become aware of what was the proper thing to do and how it should be done.

There are some phases of hospital work of which the casual visitor who sees only the patients lying in scrupulously clean and neat little cots, knows nothing.

Some of the sights a nurse sees and some of the things she has to do are too revolting to bear description. It was about three months after I had joined the hospital that I was first brought into sharp contact with this ugly side of the work of a hospital nurse.

At the spectacle laid bare to me of the hideous ravages wrought by a disease caused by depravity and vice, I was filled with loathing and a sensation of physical nausea. I turned from the patient in disgust: “I will not - I cannot - defile myself by touching this man”, I said to myself.

Then a flood of light descended upon me and, looking upwards, I beheld, bending over the patient, the figure of the Saviour. He turned His head and looked down on me, and stretching forth His hands over the disease, disfigured sinner, said:

“Inasmuch as ye do it unto these ye do it unto Me. In every creature entrusted to your care, behold Me and the work will be easy”.

 The vision - if vision it were - vanished. I turned again to the patient. Gone was all the loathing and disgust which I had felt a few moments before. Such pitiable cases came under my care in the course of my hospital experience. And always when called upon to minister to these victims of their own sinful lives there recurred to me the words, “Inasmuch as ye do it unto these ye do it unto Me”, and the work was made easy.

 The duties of a nurse are often arduous and exacting; but throughout the years that I earned my livelihood as a nurse, whenever overcome by fatigue, depression or physical weakness, nearly always I was able to gain renewed strength, courage and hope by recalling this vision of the Saviour and the words that fell from His lips.