I suppose in common with other clergy I like to think I can cope with whatever turns up.
But one situation which brings me - and I suspect many others - up short, is being called in to see a seriously ill child.
At those bedsides I share the frustration of the parents and doctors who feel they wish they could do more. I wish science was more advanced too. And so it hurts when people paint the Church as being somehow "anti-progress".
In fact I see any medical or scientific breakthrough as God opening up the secrets of creation for our benefit.
The truth is that research is not a problem for us. How it is done is the problem. Essentially; the Church believes that human life is present and should be respected from the moment of conception.
The law of the UK, on the other hand, creates a totally arbitrary time limit of 14 days, and states that you can manipulate, experiment with and even kill human beings below this stage of development.
Now a further refinement is proposed.
MPs are being asked to allow the cloning of these tiny human embryos, creating replicas. The end is good - finding new treatments for disease. But the means are immoral - the tiny cloned human beings are killed before they come to birth.
This scenario will become reality in a matter of months unless we waken up.
Alarmingly this crossing of a moral Rubicon is to take place, not after wide public debate, but as a tagged-on "affirmative instrument" which will offer parliament all of 90 minutes to consider the vast ethical implications.
A football match lasts longer.
Opponents of cloning will have just 30 minutes to halt this descent into madness.
Thirty minutes to prevent the UK becoming the pariah state of Europe, defying the Council of Europe, the European Parliament paving the way to designer-cloned babies and the ethical minefield that brings with it.
The tragedy is that science does not need to follow that route. Adult stem cells, and cells from umbilical cord can be used for the same advances as cloned embryos, and involve no ethical problems.
In recent days the University of Rome has announced it will set up a stem-cell bank which will avoid the need for cloning embryos. Yet still the UK persists in its determination to legalise cloning. The church is second to none in supporting ethical scientific advances. Those of us who sit at the bedside of the sick child, trying to offer some word of consolation, are just as desperate for progress and medical breakthroughs as anyone else. But science cannot operate in a moral vacuum.
It would be a tragedy if parliament chose to authorise the creation and destruction of thousands - perhaps millions of lives - to effect progress; a progress which could be just as effectively achieved without a single act of killing.
