“I did everything I could. But it wasn’t enough.”

I talk to nurses these days. ICU nurses work and care and listen and do as well they possibly can. It’s what nurses do. Some days, they make no mistakes, they offer remarkable care to patients and their families, they do everything they and the physicians know to do. And the patient doesn’t make it.

Sometimes, as those nurses walk off the floor and out of the building, they are spent.

What we forget, what we need to know, what we need to be reminded of is this:

Sometimes, you actually do the best that you can and you still run out. It’s not a measure of competence, not at all. Better training wouldn’t fix it. But everything in our lives, including our lives, has limits.

You run out of time. You run out of energy. You run out of ideas. You run out of wine.

The last one is particularly bad when you have planned a wedding feast and all the guests are present. There’s a celebration of friends and family. A way to impress and thank people and find relief from hard daily work. And in spite of your best efforts to get everything ready, everything right, you are out of anything but water to drink.

Every time I work with a couple to plan a wedding, I tell them that every wedding as an “oh no” and a “ahhh.” The latter comes when the preschool ring bearer successfully pulls the wagon with the toddler flower girl all the way around the sanctuary and up to the front. The “oh no” comes when the ring is left back at the hotel.

At this wedding in Cana, the “oh no” was summarized by a good friend of the family. “They have no wine,” Mary said to Jesus.

Again, sometimes the trouble you are in, the shortage that you believe is endangering everything isn’t your fault, isn’t your weakness, isn’t because of sin or of your self-ascribed stupidity. Sometimes the wine runs out.

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More on this tomorrow.