Medway Messenger, 15th October 2004

Dave Faulkner

Medway Messenger, 15th October 2004

The Medway Maritime Hospital has just come up trumps again for our family. Our second child has had a rough beginning to his life, and our GP thought he probably had a hernia. So off we went to the Penguin Assessment Unit where the paediatricians confirmed this, faxed a referral while we waited to a hospital in Lewisham where surgery would be performed, and gave us open access to their unit if in the meantime the problem recurred.

It’s just the latest incident where our local hospital has given us first-class care. The births of both children, monitoring during pregnancy, other outpatient treatment – it’s all been out of the top drawer.

But not everybody has had that positive experience. Recently the Messenger reported the case of heart patient Michael Bannister who encountered blood-soaked swabs lying around, uncollected urine-filled bottles and dirty toilets.

So who’s right about the Medway Maritime? Mr Bannister or us?

Maybe we’re both right. Maybe the hospital, like many institutions, is a mix of both good and bad.

And in that respect, perhaps it’s rather like individual human beings. All of us are that same mass of contradictions. There are those glimpses of glory when someone excels themselves and we say our faith in human nature is restored.

But there are other incidents that shatter our faith in human nature: not just the high profile evil we see reported in the media, but the inner darkness of our own hearts that we’d rather not admit.

This contradiction between the glorious goodness God made us for and our inbuilt ability to mess things up is at the heart of the human dilemma. It’s the problem the Christian message seeks to address.

It’s why Christians bang on about Jesus dying for our sins. To some it sounds like a hackneyed religious phrase, but if it is the cure for the sickness of the human heart then that doesn’t matter. When a doctor prescribes penicillin we don’t say, “Oh that is an old-fashioned cure, I won’t bother with that.”

There are many of us who would say from our own experience that the old medicine works. Though forgiven we are far from perfect and need to keep taking the tablets.

Some will say this is just a crutch for the weak. But if everyone has a fracture, who are the fools – the ones with the crutches or the ones without?

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