Intensive care medicine heroically rides in on its white stallion to save the day but all too frequently is followed by the callous black horseman of death. The physician who loves the technological toys of neonatal medicine is now confronted with a puddle of toxic emotional mercury they don’t know how to clean up. If evolutionary theory is, “all that and a bag of chips,” why is it unacceptable as a way to explain the death of a child to their parents?

I have been with many families as they mourned the loss of their babies. While the room is quiet as physical life ebbs away, the spiritual air is whipped up into a maelstrom of activity. Why did God take my child? What have I done to deserve this? Are they in a better place? Is this God’s will? Will I ever see them again? Questions, like tornadoes, tear the roofs off the parent’s worldview homes exposing them to the incessant beating of the heavenly reign. They weren’t grieving over deceased chemicals because matter cannot mourn the loss of matter. They did not shed tears because it was the end of the line for their selfish genes, but rather sobbed because a kindred spirit had moved away. They weren’t lamenting dead neurotransmitters, but rather lamenting the loss of a spirit that conducted them like a symphony. In this world people suffer from real physical disease but it also comes with some heavy spiritual baggage.

How is it possible for purely physical beings to have a spiritual hemorrhage? A material thing cannot even conceive of a spiritual realm, so from where does it draw that information? My scientific textbooks never addressed these difficult spiritual questions; they just offered anesthetics to numb them. The beauty of the Bible is that it doesn’t shy away from these queries but rather embraces them. Psalms, Job, Lamentations, and Ecclesiastes basically put a divine stamp of approval on the exploration of these complex spiritual issues. We can bury the body, but can never bury the memories. The deceased may rest in peace, but the family has just begun years of spiritual unrest. Don’t tell me humans are just chemicals or instincts. I have tested that idea out in the real world and it doesn’t work.