Dedication Part One

This evening we dedicated the new ward in prayer.  The official hooplah all starts tomorrow; pomp and circumstance, food and drink, crowds and music.  But first we gathered to pray, which in my heart it the real dedication.  A good portion of our team, all the elders from our church, and a representation of hospital staff all came together, about 35 people, and an encouraging intersection of our ministries.  We stood in the labor and delivery room and read from 1 Kings 8 where Solomon dedicates the temple.  No building can contain the Lord of Heaven and Earth . . . But like Solomon we could pray for Him to hear the pleas of the people when they cry out to Him in this place.  God with us, not in a temple or a hospital, but in the presence of the hungry, the sick, the naked, the prisoner (Matthew 25).  If these are the people through whom we now encounter Jesus . . Then this ward is a bit like the Temple, the representative dwelling of God.  We prayed for the mothers who will labor, the babies who will take their first breaths, the midwives who will make tough decisions, the nurses who will lose sleep and struggle over IV’s, the clinical and medical officers who will diagnose and prescribe, the children who will be fed and helped.  We prayed that healing and hope would abound within these new walls.