The Emergency Room That Runs on Everyone

On a Friday night in March 2023, a five-car pileup on I-75 outside Atlanta sent eleven patients flooding into Grady Memorial Hospital's trauma bay within twenty minutes. Dr. Keisha Amari, the attending surgeon, later told reporters something striking: "I didn't save anyone that night. We did."

She meant it literally. The respiratory therapist who stabilized the teenager's collapsed lung. The phlebotomist who typed and cross-matched blood faster than anyone thought possible. The chaplain who held the hand of an elderly woman so the nurses could focus on her husband in the next bay. The janitor — a man named Gerald — who noticed a blood pressure cuff had been knocked behind a crash cart and handed it to a resident at exactly the right moment.

No one in that trauma bay did the same job. The surgeon couldn't draw blood. The chaplain couldn't intubate. Gerald wasn't scrubbing in for surgery. But remove any single person, and the outcome changes.

Paul tells the Corinthians that the Spirit gives different gifts to different people — wisdom to one, faith to another, healing to another — but it is the same Spirit animating every single one. The eye cannot say to the hand, "I don't need you." Grady Memorial didn't need eleven surgeons that night. It needed exactly the team the Almighty had already assembled, each one indispensable, each one irreplaceable, each one part of the same body doing the same holy work.