Is there a doctor in the house?
In the hymn "Grace Greater Than Our Sin," Julia Harriette Johnston expressed our circumstance in song: "Dark is the stain that we cannot hide." And then, burdened by that seemingly helpless condition, she asked the desperate question: "What can avail to wash it away?"
As pastors, we know what it is to sit with someone who is in a desperate situation. A diagnosis with no treatment or cure. An enormous need with no sufficient resource to meet it. A broken relationship without the will or capacity to fix it.