My daughter is an E.R. doctor in a hospital in Hawaii. She was here with us this weekend and the following are some things I distilled from our conversations.

“Beep, beep, beep”… I am staring at the monitor in the Emergency Room. It is a recurrent, almost annoying noise.  I look to see what’s wrong. While I’m waiting for the incessant sound to stop, I figure I am one of the ones that needs to save you.

Sometimes I do; sometimes I don’t. Sometimes I do everything right and they die. Sometimes I don’t know what I’m doing and they come back. How can you tell? How can you know? What do I do with the nagging thoughts that I could have done more?

I have to conclude that life and death matters are not up to me. But that’s hard to accept when I am expected to save your life.

I treat every patient’s issue, from a broken fingernail to a brain tumor as if they were someone from my own family. Well, they are. Aren’t we all part of the family of man, and all God’s children — all made in His image — whether we recognize it or not?

You don’t want to know the things I’ve seen. They say an E.R. doctor shouldn’t go beyond 15 years at the job. I get that. I’m on year 12.

The hardest part is conveying bad news to loved ones and relatives. There is no way to sugar coat it. You can’t. False hope is far worse than the truth. The truth will set you free even though it may rip you up inside.

But this one thing I know. There is more than what we experience in this life. There’s more to life than this. There is something else. There is Someone else. The hand of God moving in the shadows.