Lent 25

It's been quite a night here at good ol' SRH and it's not even midnight yet. Between upset patients, contact precautions, code blues, rapid responses... I wonder why I'm stopping to do such a silly thing as blog about it. Well, it's a Lenten promise for one thing, but even more importantly, I REdiscovered something tonight...

I've talked to other chaplains and evidently I'm not the only who goes through this, but I go through waves of total desensitization and waves of raw emotion in my job. It had been a while since I really "felt" anything. Sure, cases have stuck with me and I've felt sad or angry or whatever the appropriate emotion when talking about it with others, but it's been a couple of months at least since I've been truly moved by my job. It doesn't seem like I've been doing this long enough to already lose a sense of emotion, but you'd be surprised what sort of coping mechanisms creep up pretty quickly. I found the emotion tonight. And tonight, I am glad for that tiny little piece of scripture to remind me that "Jesus wept." It's helpful when you ask the WWJD question and you can say, with evidence, that Jesus would cry like a baby, and that gave me a pretty good feeling as I walked across the bridge from the Tower to the Main Building weeping openly. Hey, it's what Jesus would do.

I've been involved in at least 5 really tough cases tonight and obviously, I cannot talk about them here, but they have affected me and moved me and reminded me why my job is so good and so terrible all at the same time. I can't tell you their names or who their families are or even what's wrong with them, but I can REmember them. And when I say REmember them, I do not only wish to have memory of them, but to REmember them in the whole Biblical, anamnesis, re-membering, sense of the word. It's not good enough to just remember in the shallow sense, but I want to remember them in the sense that they should be understood as spiritual and embodied beings worthy of love and dignity and intimacy and all the things their illness has denied them. I REMEMBER those five people and their families and pray for grace and peace for them this night and all the nights here on out.