My Problem with Asymmetrical Suffering

It occurred to me the other day that I choose to spend my days in the very place most people desperately hope to avoid. Nobody wakes up hoping their day leads them to the hospital. Yet I do, collecting a paycheck for being present in other people’s worst moments.

There was a moment last month where an announcement overhead came in advance for an honor walk. I’ve heard them dozens of times: code blues, traumas, and other tragedies that have become part of the ambient sounds in the hallways. On this particular occasion I decided to attend, almost unconsciously wanting to bring back a kind of humanity to the noise.

For those not familiar, an honor walk is what we call it when someone who is dying becomes an organ donor. We line the hallway and stand in silence as they’re wheeled to the OR for the final time. Hospital staff, other patients’ families who happen to be there, sometimes even visitors who don’t know the person but understand instinctively that this moment deserves witness. The family followed behind the bed, holding each other in a way that looked physically exhausting. Someone’s mother, someone’s wife, someone who that morning had been a person and by evening would be a gift that kept other people alive.

We stood there in silence because what else can you do? Applause feels wrong, but so does nothing. So we stand, and by standing we say: we see this. We see what you’re doing. We see what it’s costing you. Your grief is not invisible.

After they passed, we all went back to work. But I thought about it for the rest of my shift, how that family would leave the hospital without the person they came with, how the hallways would look exactly the same tomorrow even though today everything had changed for them And this is the part that troubles me: I could leave. They couldn’t.

At the same time… I was having a rough week.

Nothing catastrophic happened, but everything felt harder than it should be. Difficult conversations, systems not working, the weight of being responsible for decisions that matter more than my confidence in making them. I was tired and frustrated and indulging in a form of self-pity that comes from having a hard day at a job that pays well and doesn’t actually threaten my life.

Then I walked past a room where a woman was crying. Not the stifled tears of someone trying to maintain composure, but the kind of crying that comes from grief too large to contain. Her husband sat beside her, holding her hand, looking at his own hands, looking anywhere but at the monitors that were telling them something they didn’t want to hear.

My bad day suddenly felt obscene.

Not because suffering is a competition or because I’m not allowed to struggle with ordinary frustrations, but because the contrast was so stark it became impossible to ignore. The chasm I saw was this: I was tired from working. They were facing something that would divide their life into “before” and “after.”

Paul wrote about suffering producing perseverance, perseverance producing character (Romans 5:3-4). But he was writing to people experiencing actual persecution, not people who had frustrating meetings. There’s a category error I keep making where I treat ordinary difficulty as if it’s suffering, where I spiritualize inconvenience into something more significant than it actually is. Working in a hospital recalibrates this constantly. It’s hard to sustain the fiction that your problems are overwhelming when you’re surrounded by people facing problems that actually are overwhelming: cancer that won’t respond to treatment, strokes that steal language and movement, infections that require isolation from everyone you love, pain that can be managed but not eliminated.

But here’s what troubles me more than my misdirected self-pity.

I’ve developed what you might call “professional distance.” What others might call callousness.

There’s a phrase we use in healthcare: “Everyone dies.” It’s meant to be realistic, to acknowledge mortality without pretense, to help new staff cope with the inevitable losses that come with this work. Everyone does die. This is not controversial theology. But it’s remarkably easy to say when you’re the one who gets to leave at the end of your shift. I can walk past rooms where families are receiving devastating news and continue on to my next task without breaking stride. I witness suffering that would have undone me ten years ago and feel nothing more than mild sympathy mixed with the practical concern of whether this will delay my other work.

This numbness developed gradually, imperceptibly.

You can’t function in a hospital if you feel the full weight of every tragedy you encounter. You’d be useless within a week. So you develop distance. You create categories: the patients you can help, the patients you can’t, the families who need extra support, the situations where your presence matters versus where it’s just procedural. You learn to stand in honor walk lines and then go back to work. You learn to walk past the crying woman’s room. You learn to treat death as the expected outcome rather than the tragedy.This is presented as professional maturity, as the development of necessary boundaries. And maybe it is. But it’s also a form of moral sedation.

When Jesus encountered suffering, he didn’t maintain professional distance. He wept at Lazarus’s tomb even though he knew he was about to raise him from the dead (John 11:35). He was moved with compassion for crowds because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd (Matthew 9:36). The Greek word “splagchnizomai” literally means to be moved in your bowels, your guts, the visceral center of your being.

I don’t feel that anymore. Maybe I never did. What I feel is the manageable concern of someone who has seen this before and will see it again, someone who knows that everyone dies and has made peace with that reality through repeated exposure rather than through genuine theological wrestling.

There’s a verse in Hebrews that troubles me: “Remember those who are in prison, as though you were in prison with them; those who are being tortured, as though you yourselves were being tortured” (Hebrews 13:3). The instruction is to identify with suffering so completely that you experience it as if it were your own.

But I can’t do this.

Or more accurately, I won’t, because doing so would make it impossible to continue working here. The suffering I witness daily is not mine to carry. I have carefully constructed professional boundaries to ensure I don’t take it home with me. This is probably necessary for survival in this profession. But it also means my witness is fundamentally different from the biblical mandate. I am present to suffering, but I am not present in suffering. I observe it from a position of safety, protected by the knowledge that at the end of my shift I will leave and they will remain.

The honor walk is perhaps the clearest example of this asymmetry. We create this ritual…lining hallways, standing in silence, bearing witness… that is meant to dignify death and acknowledge sacrifice. And it does those things. The families notice. It matters to them But we also get to walk away afterward. We performed our witness, demonstrated our compassion, and then returned to our normal activities. The ritual allowed us to acknowledge suffering without being consumed by it, to participate in grief without actually grieving.

Is this redemptive? Or is it just theater?

When Jesus said the healthy don’t need a physician, only the sick do (Mark 2:17), he was responding to the Pharisees’ criticism about the company he kept. He sought out tax collectors and sinners, lepers and the demon-possessed. He went to the sick deliberately, intentionally, as part of his mission. But I go to the hospital because it pays my student loans.

Jesus chose proximity to suffering as an expression of divine compassion. I chose proximity to suffering as a career path that offered job security and reasonable compensation. Both involve being present with the sick, but the motivations seem fundamentally different.

The families I see didn’t choose to be here.

They’re trapped by circumstance, by biology, by the random cruelty of bodies that betray them. Their presence in this place is involuntary, necessary, inescapable. Mine is not. At the end of my shift, I leave. I go home to a life that doesn’t include monitors and IV poles and the smell of institutional disinfectant trying to mask human decay. I get to have bad days about frustrating meetings. I get to forget for hours at a time that people are dying in rooms I walked past earlier.

This creates a fundamental asymmetry that professional ethics tries to manage but can’t eliminate. Jesus didn’t build institutions for the sick. He healed some people and left others unhealed. He spent time with lepers but didn’t establish leprosy clinics. He drove out demons but didn’t create mental health facilities. His approach to suffering was personal, immediate, relational…. not systematic or institutional.

Which raises uncomfortable questions about what it means to practice healthcare in His name. Because most of what I do is maintain systems, manage protocols, ensure compliance with regulations designed to minimize liability. I am not healing people through divine power or even through personal relationship. I am participating in a complex institutional apparatus that treats bodies as problems to be solved by people with the right credentials using the right procedures. This can be good work. It saves lives, reduces suffering, extends the duration and quality of human existence. But it’s not the same as what Jesus did, and pretending otherwise seems dishonest.

There’s something corrosive about prolonged exposure to death.

You start to treat mortality as mundane. You develop efficiency around death, learning to navigate the paperwork and the family dynamics and the logistics of what happens to bodies after they stop being people. This efficiency is necessary for the system to function. If every death brought operations to a halt while we properly mourned, nothing would get done. So we develop the distance, maintain the boundaries, cultivate the professional detachment that allows us to be sad about deaths while not being destroyed by them. But I wonder what this does to our souls over time. Whether the numbness that keeps us functional also makes us less human, less capable of the kind of visceral compassion that characterized Jesus’s response to pain. Paul wrote that we should “rejoice with those who rejoice, weep with those who weep” (Romans 12:15). But I don’t weep with the families I encounter. I offer sympathy, provide information, ensure they have access to support services. I am professional, appropriate, even kind.

But I don’t weep.

Despite all this….the asymmetry, the numbness, the theological dissonance….I keep going back.

Not because I’ve resolved these tensions or because I’ve found a way to make professional healthcare work align neatly with biblical mandates about caring for the sick. I go back because the work still matters, even if my relationship to it is complicated.

Because sometimes I do see something.

In the respiratory therapist adjusting settings with focused attention even when the outcome is uncertain. In the families holding hands in rooms full of bad news. In the honor walk witnesses who didn’t have to stand there but did anyway.

Maybe holiness in healthcare doesn’t look like Jesus’s immediate, personal healing. Maybe it looks more like showing up to places of suffering even when you can’t fix anything, bearing witness even when that witness is imperfect and bounded and complicated by the fact that you’re collecting a paycheck for it.

Maybe the hospital is sacred space not because we do sacred work there but because it’s where the fiction of self-sufficiency falls apart.

I don’t know. But I keep going back.