pastoral care

Baby Boy (Davies Tales #4)

Mon, 11/23/2009 - 14:28 — Adam Thomas

During the summer between his first and second years of seminary, Aidan Davies grew up all at once. The summer began with a breakup and ended with a baptism, but those are pieces of a larger story. This story is about a baby boy.

Davies was a chaplain only because his badge said he was. For that first month, he didn’t particularly feel like one. I’m not a chaplain, but I play one at this hospital, he often thought. His clinical pastoral educators – the hospital’s professional chaplains – had borrowed their teaching style from mother birds. On the third day of the summer, they pushed Davies and the seven other interns out of the nest and watched as eight pairs of arms, flapping wildly, disappeared in a downward spiral. The wingless interns crashed into the rocky bottom, and, miraculously, found their patients there.

Rock bottom was on the top floor of the hospital, but Davies had no patients on that level considering another intern had chosen the ICU as his normal beat. However, that night, Davies was on-call, and the on-call pager had beckoned him to Intensive Care, and he stared at the message on the little screen the whole elevator ride to the twelfth story.... READ MORE.

Are we counselors?

Tue, 11/17/2009 - 12:44 — Carol Howard Merritt

Carol Howard Merritt's blog

Recently, we had a continuing education event at our church on responding to the economic crisis. As we all know, even though the markets are up, and things seem to be stable, the unemployment rate is still high. While the general population is moving on with their Christmas shopping, a huge percentage of our country is still unemployed, trying to get a job in an incredibly tight market. So the needs in our congregations, as well as the level of anxiety and depression, can be quite high.

So we gathered, with two counselors, to find out how to best support people who are suffering during this time–our friends, our loved ones, our members, and often ourselves. One pastor began his question, “When we counsel people who have lost their jobs….”

And the counselor stopped him and said, “You don’t counsel people who have lost their jobs. You are not counselors, you’re not therapists. You can free yourself from that notion.” ... READ MORE.

A touch of hospitality

Mon, 09/21/2009 - 10:17 — Chris Brundage

Chris Brundage's blog

I visited a woman who will die soon. She lay asleep in her nursing home bed, a plastic mat on the floor in case she fell. A black and white photo of her as a young woman hung on the wall next to her dresser. I anointed her with oil and sat quietly with her for a time. A ministry of presence is a simple thing.

A nurse in blue scrubs stopped by the room. “Can I get you a cup of coffee?”

“No thanks,” I said, surprised by the offer.

“If you need anything, just ask,” he said and walked on. I said nurse, but he may have been a CNA, certified nursing assistant. Whatever he was, he was kind and attentive to my needs as I sat with a dying woman.... READ MORE.

The former pastors club

Thu, 09/17/2009 - 10:31 — Brett Younger

Brett Younger's blog

I’m going through withdrawal. I still feel anxious on Saturday night and take a nap on Sunday afternoon—even though I haven’t done anything. I seek out former pastors so that we can talk about the glory and gunk of our former lives. Sometimes former pastors get a funny look on their faces as if they’re reminiscing about a high school sweetheart who got away. We are Wallendas without a tightrope, Kennedys without politics, Mannings without football. One of the ways I’ve been dealing with my mixed emotions is compiling a list of things I don’t miss about being a pastor.

I don’t miss knowing that the party will get louder after I walk out the door.
I don’t miss the alarm going off at 6:45 on Sunday morning.
I don’t miss looking around the Blockbuster for church members before I take James Bond to the checkout.
I don’t miss the phrase, “Pardon my language, Reverend.”
I don’t miss there being an 80% chance I’ll be called on to pray before a meal.
I don’t miss feeling responsible when it rains at the church picnic.
I don’t miss visiting a member’s third cousin in the hospital after a knee replacement, because the member “can’t get by to see her myself” and seeing the look on the patient’s face that says, “Who are you and why are you here?”
I don’t miss business meetings.

READ MORE.

Ministry

Wed, 04/08/2009 - 10:32 — Theresa Coleman

Theresa Coleman's blog

I have been thinking a lot recently, but have not had time to put down my thoughts. I've been thinking about why I am a minister and I think it's because I love life in liminal spaces. I love life in the in-between spaces, in the transitional spaces, in what mystics might call the thin spaces.

I love to sit in contemplation at the edge of a rock quarry, at the edge of a meadow, at the beginning of the dunes and watch life occur around and within me. I've heard it said that 80 percent of the wildlife exists within 20 feet of this space where the forest meets the meadow. The animals weave in and out of the vegetation interacting with each other in dappled shadow and sunlight. I love to sit just at the edge of the dunes and the beach, watching the snow crab and painted buntings flit in and out of the myrtles. I love the edge of the rock quarry where the birds can dive off into empty space in glorious abandon........ READ MORE.

Incurious

Mon, 10/20/2008 - 16:22 — Keith Herron

Keith Herron's blog

Seems there’s a lot of talk these days about the notion of incuriosity. Webster’s describes it as “lacking interest, as in detached.” Garrison Keillor mirrors this term by famously labeling President Bush as, “the current occupant.” Keillor’s pet phrase seems to capture the spirit of one accused of being incurious, don’t you think? Did anyone know just how incurious the President could be when he marched into the White House eight years ago? When asked to name a mistake he might have made in his first term he couldn’t think of one. Even today there seems to be no sense of acceptance of how the war has gone or how the national debt has grown while the economy has sunk. Incurious might be kind in light of how things have gone for the current occupant...

To have without holding

Mon, 09/01/2008 - 16:18 — Jan Richardson

Jan Richardson's blog

One summer when I was preparing to become a minister, I spent the season doing a unit of Clinical Pastoral Education at a hospital in north Florida. CPE is something like an intensive internship in a setting that intertwines pastoral experience and regular reflection with a peer group and supervisor. During our orientation at the beginning of the summer, all the CPE interns toured the various units of the hospital. When we visited the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit, one of my colleagues asked, “How frequently do you have to deal with the death of an infant?” The nurse said, “Oh, we haven’t had a death in ages.”

I was assigned to the NICU for the summer. During my first three weeks, I received four calls for severely premature infants who had died.

In addition to the NICU, I also worked in Pediatric Surgery. Most of the patients had short stays, but I spent a fair bit of time with several who were there for longer visits. Midway through the summer, several of them were discharged on the same day. For most of them, leaving the hospital was great news; they were going home and settling back into a normal rhythm of life. One young boy, however, was not going home. An eight-year-old battling a tenacious spinal tumor, he was moving to a rehab center because he didn’t have a stable home to return to. The day I had met him,

Baggage claim

Thu, 06/26/2008 - 14:36 — Larry Vaughan

Note:
Larry Vaughan was once the pastor of a church. He now does the Lord's work in an institution working with the sort of kids the Church cannot handle. He is a marvelous writer, and what follows is a great example of the kid of things you'll find at his blog, Ad augusta per angust.This piece was originally published there on June 4th, 2008.

When a patient comes into our hospital they bring bags with them. When they get back to our unit we have a staff person go through their belongings and check each item for safety (you can’t have your own razors or knives), appropriateness (your shirt can’t glorify drugs), and contraband (we’ll be flushing that blunt you have hidden in your shoe). Then we do a skin assessment. That’s a fancy term for getting nekkid in front of a nurse so she can record all of your scars, bruises, piercings, and tattoos. We do these two things so we know exactly what you are bringing to our facility.

Unfortunately we don’t have a secret detector.

In addition to their belongings our residents bring in another type of baggage. This one is invisible to the naked eye, yet the impact of its contents are deep and real.

CCBlogs thinking critically, living faithfully