As a hospital chaplain who ministered at four local hospitals, Fr. Mark was a busy man. He was on call twenty-four hours a day, had witnessed a lot of pain, heartache, and misery during the course of his years of service. To seek respite from the grinding schedule that occasionally wore him down, he often retreated to an old, abandoned church building. Here he engaged in meditation, read, or simply allowed his mind and body to relax. He always felt renewed after a visit to this old, decrepit-looking building with fallen ivy hanging on the walls. It was a deserted and crumbling place, but for him it had become a peaceful sanctuary.

Late one afternoon, after a particularly taxing and difficult day, Fr. Mark decided that a visit to the old, church building was in order. He yearned for this quiet and tranquil space where his soul urgently needed to withdraw so he could breathe, think, and dream alone. He entered the old, church building which had been forsaken long ago, but was open to any pilgrims who still sought its solace. He inhaled its musty air of abandonment and smiled in recollection as he envisioned the hundreds of hurrying worshippers who had once scrambled down the aisle with such life and vitality.

“Everything changes,” he thought.

Just then, his hospital pager went off. This was before the age of the cell phone. “Oh, no,” he sighed. “Just when I was beginning to unwind.”

He tried to retrieve his message, but for some reason it was strangely garbled.

“That’s odd,” he thought. “What’s the matter with the pager?” Someone had paged him, but he couldn’t figure out who it was or the contents of the message or which hospital needed him?

The old, run-down building had no telephone, of course, so he had to leave its grounds to check in with the four hospital chaplaincy departments that had his beeper number. “No,” said everyone he talked to, “We didn’t call you. Try the other hospitals.” He tried all of them, but the staff in each hospital was as perplexed as he was. No one who had his pager number had given him a call.

“The pager must be malfunctioning,” he mused, as he returned to the old, church building to continue his disrupted retreat. “I’ll have to bring it into the company tomorrow to be repaired,” he thought as he entered the old church grounds.

Then he stopped and stared in total disbelief. During his absence, a wing of the old church building had collapsed onto itself. The very wing where he had been seated only a short time before. If he had remained there, he would most certainly be dead.

God was watching over him.

—Fr. Hugh Duffy