A couple of weeks spent worrying and, at times, sitting beside a family member as he came through a series of operations does something to your perspective. You watch the machines quietly keeping him nourished, oxygenated, monitored, and free from pain. Tubes, wires, beeps, and human hands all working together for good. The patient is suddenly taken from self-sufficiency to total dependence — held together by things beyond himself. That was what stirred these thoughts in me.

If only we could allow ourselves to become dependent on God — overcome by the wild bigness of Him.

I think I need somehow to merge the gentle Jesus I have always known with the mighty, frightening God my Aunty Evelyn spoke about with such 1960s certainty. Surely peace comes when God becomes larger again and I become smaller; when I stop trying to hold myself together and instead surrender to being held.

We quote the verse about perfect love driving out fear, but perhaps that love is not always soft and cosy. Perhaps it screams at us in great neon letters across the universe — frightening in its magnitude, terrifying in its holiness, yet still love. Scary, perhaps, like the fierce medical devotion shown to this hospital patient: unknown, unexpected, unnerving, yet necessary.

We are all on a kind of spiritual life support. Our bodies are “shutting down,” as they say in the medical trade, and little by little, we are being handed over to the power of God. And that is not a tragedy at all, but grace. For as Paul says in 1 Corinthians 15:19:

“If only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied.”