All posts Rescue the Perishing
10/19/2012 10:28:41 AM
By Carmen Fowler LaBerge with Scott Lamb
A feature story ran in the October 7 edition of The New York Times, highlighting the unit of police officers who try to save the lives of citizens on the verge of suicide. “On Bridges and Rooftops, Saving People From Themselves,” tells the story of the nearly 300 men and women officers who are highly trained in suicide rescue.
Here is an excerpt:
Each year, the Police Department receives hundreds of 911 calls for so-called jumper jobs, or reports of people on bridges and rooftops threatening to jump. So far this year, that number is on track to surpass last year’s total, 519.
The department’s Emergency Service Unit responds to those calls. The roughly 300 officers in the unit are specially trained in suicide rescue, the delicate art of saving people from themselves; they know just what to say and, perhaps more important, what not to say.
“You wouldn’t want to say, ‘Yeah, things are bad and who knows if they can even get better,’ ” Inspector Robert Lukach, the unit’s executive, said. “You always have to be positive. I like to tell my guys: Bring yourself into it. If he says, ‘Oh, I’m having problems with my wife,’ say: ‘Yeah, I have problems with my wife, too. My wife just yelled at me yesterday for not doing the dishes.’ ”
The officer’s goal is to form a rapport with the person and seize upon the one emotional chord that will get him or her to climb down from the edge. “You have to understand and extend yourself because your obvious goal is to save someone’s life,” Inspector Lukach said. “So if you have to give a little, you give a little. That’s the sacrifice you make.”
The mental gymnastics can go on for hours, and do not always pay off.
On a cold day this past winter, Detective Taylor was talking to a psychiatric patient who had squeezed through a sixth-floor bathroom window at Bellevue Hospital Center. The man’s toes barely fit on a building lip below, so he mostly clung to the window ledge by his fingers. He told the detective that he had killed somebody a few years back and could no longer live with the guilt.
“O.K., we all make mistakes,” Detective Taylor said he told him. “That doesn’t mean you should take your life. We’re all human beings. None of us are perfect.”
“Why don’t you just push me? Why don’t you just end it for me?” the man goaded the detective, who recounted his words.
“That’s not my purpose for being here,” Detective Taylor gently told him.
For nearly three hours, Detective Taylor leaned out a seventh-floor window, talking, buying time, as other officers cut away window glass to create an opening large enough to make a grab. Detective Taylor sensed the man was ready to come in. He was shirtless and cold; his muscles quivered. He asked for a blanket, the detective recalled.
“Fatigue set in,” he said. “He was extending his arms to me, but I couldn’t reach him. At that point, he panicked a little bit, and that’s when he kind of groaned and said, ‘O.K.,’ and he left — fell.” Detective Taylor, who has worked in emergency services for 12 years, spoke in a low voice, pausing pensively between words.
“That was my first failure,” he said. “That was the one and only time that I lost someone I was talking to.”
In reading the article, I could not help but think of the parallel to one of the aims of Christian ministry, best summed up by the old Fanny Crosby lines
Rescue the perishing, care for the dying,
Snatch them in pity from sin and the grave;
Weep o’er the erring one, lift up the fallen,
Tell them of Jesus, the mighty to save.
Rescue the perishing, care for the dying,
Jesus is merciful, Jesus will save.
Christian ministry goes beyond seeking the rescue of a human life; it is concerned with both the body and soul of the individual. But, the daily urgency that these officers must feel as they don their uniform and head into work should also be felt in the heart of the Christian pastor.
Do we minister as though lives and souls are at stake? As these officers do, are we willing to put our own lives on the line and our own story into the narratives we tell to those who are hopeless and apart from the Gospel?
When these officers go home at the end of the night, they can tell their kids about how they rescued someone off the top of a bridge or balcony. Pastors, do you ever have the opportunity to go home and tell your family about a Gospel conversation you had with a soul who stood on the precipice of eternity … and how you spoke Gospel words of Jesus to them and they believed and found Jesus’ salvation?
Jesus rescued us. As such, we are agents of rescue for Christ.