Real life stories are best

It's a common practice to quote books, songs, and poems. This time, I would like to quote a piece of an email from my friend Ben. Ben is a hospital chaplain, and one of the greatest men I've ever met. The world needs more people like him.
Here's an excerpt from the email, where Ben talks about different experiences he's had at his job:

"There are plenty of stories from the hospital. The better stories are probably more tragedy than comedy, don't you know - but that stuff makes you feel alive too. On the comic side of things, let me see... I had a psych patient take a swing at me. (She only made contact once, and that was a glancing blow.) One of the other chaplains had a five minute conversation with a dead guy. One of my psych patients took over the Sunday service singing "Dust in the Wind" as a tribute to his recently deceased brother, "Two-Toke Tom"... I sat with a divorced couple - parents of a patient - and watched as they renewed a bitter fight there in the room and she lunged out of the chair and grabbed him by the jaw.

The other day I visited a patient who the social worker told me was hard of hearing. I went in talking loudly, projecting my voice wanting to make sure she could hear me. She was signing some things and her friend in the chair next to the bed was signing back. Then he laughed and said to me. "She can hear just fine. I'm the one who's stone deaf! She's just signing for me."

I sat with a mother on Christmas morning after the doctor came in and told her that her son would never wake up from the coma he was in. She fell on her knees by his bedside and held his hand. Late that night, around midnight, I got a call from the nurse saying, "You've got to get up here... There's been a miracle!" When I got to the room, his mother was still crying, but laughing too. Her son was awake, responding to commands. Within a couple of weeks I saw him walking..."

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