serving – Sheila Dougal

Lessons from my marriage: Three practices to build compassion when we disagree

I listened to Ashley Hales podcast, Finding Holy, the other day. Tish Warren Harrison, the guest, shared her desire to help the Church find a way, “…between capitulation and combativeness,” in relating to those who see the world differently than they do.

I’m always drawn to discussions about how Christians should relate to those whose worldview is different. Not because I’m trying finally find the right answer, but because that is my life. My husband is not a Christian. As he puts, we have different loves, “You worship Jesus and I don’t.” Those are his words.

My worship of Jesus and my husband’s resistance to worship has been a source of pain between us for 28 years. And like Tish discussed on the podcast, I’ve swung between capitulation and combativeness, or in my case, capitulation and comatoseness, in our 28 years together. I’m an enneagram 9. So I don’t tend toward combativeness. In fact I’d rather go numb than combat anyone, over just about anything except my kids. Come for my kids, and I’ll turn Rambo on you. But I digress. What Tish said caught my attention because I have experienced the hand of God continually guiding me to walk the path of vulnerable and fearless love on the solid ground between joining my husband’s unbelief and fighting against it, or in my case, going numb to it.

There is a way to love between capitulation and combativeness…or comatoseness.

The temptation to surrender to unbelief, to give up on being involved in church, reading my Bible, praying, singing songs of worship, giving generously, serving others and teaching my children about Jesus is always there. I don’t even need my husband’s unbelief to be tempted to give up on those things. My own self-centered desires beckon me to take up the life Christ has called me to lay down. As though I would be a better god than He.

The other option would be to fight against my husband’s unbelief, berating him with Bible verses, well-thought out arguments, pointing out all his moral failings. Or in my case, saying nothing. Withdrawing. Going into doormat mode. I am guilty of both. The temptation to check-out whispers, “It doesn’t matter what you say. You might as well disappear. Nothing you say or do is going to change anything.”

Jesus has been pulling me out of the ditches on either side of loving my husband well for 28 years. And he’s kept my husband’s heart turned towards his family, despite all the siren songs that have tried to shipwreck our life. When I find myself veering towards one ditch or the other, I’m helped by being honest about my own brokenness, being vulnerable- willing to bear the pain that comes with speaking the truth, and by taking a posture of service.

Don’t get me wrong here. I fail at those three practices all the time. Like I said, Jesus has been pulling me out of the ditch on either side of this trail following him in learning to love well. But I am learning.

One of the things I’m learning is a key to fostering healthy relationships with others, whether they share your faith or not, is acknowledging that we both have brokenness. Part of learning to love another well is facing your own problems and lack of faith. I can’t easily turn towards combativeness or comatoseness with my husband if I acknowledge that I too struggle with lust for power, self-centeredness, and pride.

When the differences between what guides my decisions and desires and what guides my husband’s seem to pit us against each other, being willing to be vulnerable, to speak the truth in love, even if it’s not received, puts a cruciform posture in my part of the relationship. That posture speaks Christ. It’s says, “This is wrong. And I love you. I’m not going to abandon you even though dealing with this hurts.” To be willing to suffer the pain of addressing the problems we have with each other and not abandon the relationship simply because we don’t agree is a Christlike posture that deals in a currency of compassion rather than combativeness or comatoseness.

When I think about what I believe-that the Jesus of the Bible is God in the flesh, come to live a fully human life and take the form of a servant. Touching the untouchables. Reasoning with the proud and argumentative. Healing the sick. Delivering the demonized. Teaching the stubborn. Washing the feet of those who would abandon him. When I think about this Jesus, I can’t take a posture of proud distain of even the most corrupt combatant who disagrees with me. Much less my own husband or neighbors, coworkers or friends who don’t see eye to eye with me. Jesus compels me to take a posture of serving these. How can I help you get what you need? What can I do to bring joy or blessing to you? What can I say that would encourage you? These are the questions Jesus brings to these sometimes awkward and strained relationships

This man I love, I wish he would embrace the Jesus of the Bible as his savior and God and follow him with me. I wish that for my family, friends and neighbors and those who think I’m nuts.

But if they never do, it will not be a waste of my life to let Jesus spend my life teaching me to love them well.

Three reasons you think you shouldn’t serve in your church’s kids ministry

Photo by Victoria Borodinova on Pexels.com

Whether your church calls it family ministry, children’s ministry, kids ministry… whatever it’s called, here are three reasons people often give for why they shouldn’t serve in a ministry that involves children. I propose these three reasons are exactly why you should sign up this Sunday to serve in your church’s ministry to the next generation.

Because You Aren’t a Kid Person

I hear this a lot. As a kids ministry leader at my church, I often hear people say they aren’t kid people. That’s why they don’t serve in kids ministry. And to a point there’s good reasoning there.

Not everyone is suited for holding babies, singing Jesus Loves Me with toddlers, and teaching elementary students to discern Jesus from the Bible lesson. In fact, there are some really good reasons a person should have no contact with kids in church. But just because you don’t feel all warm and fuzzy when kids are around, and you don’t talk to babies like you’re in a cartoon, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t serve in your church’s ministry to the next generation.

In fact, if you are quick to say, “I’m not a kid person,” you should sign up to serve in kids ministry. Let God take that aversion you have to kids and the chaos they may make you feel, and use it to lower yourself and listen to Jesus say, “Unless you turn and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.” (Matthew 18:3)

If you’re not a kid person, you don’t have to be the lead teacher or the one who guides the toddlers in a game of follow the leader. But get on the ground next to a kid playing with the Noah’s ark play set. Let God use those kids to show you how much he loves and accepts you as you are, and is leading you to grow up to be like Jesus.

Because You Work With Kids All Day Long

A reason many give for not serving in a ministry to children is that they work with kids every day during the week. They don’t want to work with kids at church too.

Teachers, daycare workers, preschool aides… you all are the pros! Your church’s kids ministry needs you to help them learn how to manage a classroom. We need your skills!

In Exodus 35, when Moses called the people of Israel to build the tabernacle as God instructed, he called for people with different skills to use their abilities not just for their own homes, but for the house God was having them build.

“Let every skillful craftsman among you come and make all that the LORD has commanded… All the women whose hearts stirred them to use their skill spun the goats’ hair… ‘See the LORD has called by name Bezalel the son of Uri, son of Hur, of the tribe of Juday; and he has filled him with the Spirit of God, with skill, with intelligence, with knowledge, and with all craftsmanship…” Exodus 35:10, 26, 30-31

Jesus is building his church. And one way he does that is by calling people with different abilities in the church to serve one another using those skills. There’s an ability needed to guide a group of kids to listen and learn together. If you have that skill, sign up this Sunday to serve in your church’s ministry to the next generation. Build Jesus’ kingdom with your classroom management talents.

Because You’re Retired

In 2017, John Piper spoke to a group of college students at Grand Canyon University. The title of his speech, “Better to Lose Your Life Than Waste It.”

Towards the end of his message, Piper responds to Paul’s desire to go to Jerusalem in Acts 20:22, as a fictional American trying to talk some sense into the elderly apostle:

But Paul, you’re getting old. How ’bout a little cottage on the Aegean Sea? You’ve already done more in your ministry than most people could do in five lifetimes. It’s time to rest. Let the last twenty years of your life be travel and golf, shuffleboard and putzing around the garage and digging in the garden. Let Timothy have a chance. He’s young. Don’t go to Jerusalem. Agabus the prophet has told you, they are going to bind your hands and feet and hand you over to the Gentiles (Acts 21:11). And whatever you do, don’t go to Rome. And get out of your head the crazy plan of going to Spain at your age. You could get yourself killed. It isn’t American! It’s not the American Dream of ‘the sunset years.

The point of Piper’s message is old age in Jesus’ church isn’t a reason for sitting back and relaxing while younger folks do the work of the ministry. And it isn’t just John Piper preaching this message. In the Bible the psalmist pleads with God to give him a ministry even when he’s old, “So even to old age and grey hairs, O God, do not forsake me, until I proclaim your might to another generation, your power to all those to come.” (Psalm 71:18)

And in Joshua 14:6-15, when 85 year old Caleb finally enters the land God promised Israel, he tells Joshua, “And now, behold, the Lord has kept me alive, just as he said, these forty-five years since the time that the Lord spoke this word to Moses, while Israel walked in the wilderness. And now, behold, I am this day eighty-five years old. I am still as strong today as I was in the day that Moses sent me; my strength now is as my strength was then, for war and for going and coming. So now give me this hill country of which the Lord spoke on that day, for you heard on that day how the Anakim were there, with great fortified cities. It may be that the Lord will be with me, and I shall drive them out just as the Lord said.”

Not every person of retirement age can get down on the ground with toddlers, but if you’re a retiree and you can enter a church building, this Sunday you should sign up to serve the next generation of parents and children in your church.

It’s FUN!

Ok, that’s four, and it’s not a reason people give for not wanting to serve in a ministry to children. But I think it’s a reason many of us serious folks might unconsciously use as a reason we avoid kids ministry.

I tend to be too serious. In fact, it’s a prayer of mine this year that I will laugh more. I know that’s pathetic, but its true. Serving in kids ministry has caused me to laugh and have fun even while the hard things of life happen around us.

Proverbs 31 speaks of the woman who is clothed with strength and dignity. She opens her mouth and teaches others with kindness and wisdom. And she laughs at the time to come.

When you lower yourself to sit criss-cross and sing Jesus Loves Me with toddlers; when you learn to teach Jesus to a child, you will grow in strength and dignity and you’ll find yourself having the best kind of fun. You’ll laugh with a pure heart and it will be good!

I pray this stirs your heart. I pray if you’re not a kid person, and if you’re a teacher person or a retired person, you will turn your reasons for not serving the children and parents in your church into the reasons you sign up to serve them on Sunday.

Christians- get close. Stop idolizing and breaking others. Start serving them.

delighted black female barista serving coffee in cup in cafe — Photo by Andrea Piacquadio on Pexels.com

On May 27th, the New York Times published the 100,000 names of people who died from Coronavirus. If you scroll down the screen of the online piece, you’ll see the images of humans scattered sparsley at first, then densly as time moves forward. Next to many of these human icons you’ll read the name, age and something specific about that person- their occupation, hobby or passion. The response intended from such a piece is sobriety and grief. Maybe if you read the names you’ll stop living with this intoxicated view that everything is fine. Maybe you’ll even feel sad that so many have lost their lives to this disease. When I first read the article I remember feeling sober and sad. But I also had questions. What would we do if we knew the 100,000? What if we knew the wrong they’ve done? Would we honor them like Jesus honors the undeserving? Would we do the vulnerable work of discipleship?

In my work as a nurse, and before that as a nurse’s aide, I’ve cared for people whose family members disowned them. Some had been abusive. Some were addicts. Some had abandoned their children. I’m sure my patients over the years have done many grievous things. My tending to their needs in times of illness, debility or injury is not dictated by how these people lived their lives. Yes it is my job, but also, I believe my work exemplifies the way God made us to live- to love and serve one another. Even when we know the evil the other has done. As a nurse, this way of loving isn’t passive or sugar-coated. It requires the broken to do things that hurt so they can get better, and at times it compels me to ask patients facing their mortality what their hope is.

Today, I read a heartbreaking story from David French about his friend and former client, Mike Adams. Mr. French’s eulogy is titled: A Eulogy for a Friend, a Lament for our Nation. America today—broken people, breaking each other. I was disturbed, convicted and saddened by what I read. Mr. French’s friend had said provocative things. And people sought his ruin in response. I don’t know if someone loved Mr. Adams enough to get close and express concern about things he said. As a people with screens in our faces, we don’t get face to face with others, see their sins and deal with them in an effort to bring wholeness. We do what Mr. French said. We break each other.

Undoubtedly there were many Mike Adams among the hundreds of thousands who’ve died of Covid-19. When the masses die we, as a culture, lament. But when among the masses one is exposed for some evil thing he or she said or did, we crush them. Jesus is not like this. And his people should not be like this either.

There is a distinct difference between our tendency to swoon over people and then destroy those same people on social media from a safe distance, and Jesus. Jesus doesn’t swoon, he knows what’s in people. He knows the evil that lurks in us all. But that knowing doesn’t lead him to destroy. Jesus, knowing what’s in us, deals with us, on a personal level. He lowers himself. He serves, even his betrayers, washing their feet (see John 13). We don’t naturally do this. The virtue of vulnerable love that exposes wickedness and offers redemption and reconciliation, is distinctly Christlike.

I expect humans to devour each other. But as Christians, vulnerable love should distinguish us from the rest of humanity. We should display a tangible foreignness in how we engage people, whether we know the wrong they’ve done or not. Not that we won’t be guilty of swooning and stabbing people, we will. I have. But we should be a people turning from idolizing and impaling others with our words. Increasingly, we should be a people noted for honoring and serving others, not because they’re good, but because Christ is good.

We have been sacrificially and scandalously served and loved by the God who knew our wickedness before we performed it. Therefore, as Christians, we should exhibit a kind of sobriety about humanity that knows the evil we’re all capable of. And with that sobriety we should bravely engage our fellow man with an other-wordly love.

There are a lot of shoulds in this blog. I don’t like shoulds. I want to be motivated by love, not rules. But just like a good parent, there is a need to remind a child what he should be doing, because we love him. I am as guilty as any of looking at the masses with sentimentality or with slander on my tongue. All these shoulds are aimed at me first. It’s hard to love like Jesus. It’s vulnerable. But it’s what I’m called to do. And it is love, that motivates me to do it.

The masses are dying around us, but get close Christian, close enough to love your enemy with your hands, like Jesus did with Judas. Get close enough to have a gracious conversation over coffee with your neighbor about what you heard your him say, like Jesus did with the woman at the well. Get low with the marginalized and despised, like Jesus did with lepers and tax collectors and prostitutes. Don’t engage others this way because they’re kind or good. But because the Spirit of the Lord Jesus is upon us and he is immeasurably kind and good.

The church as a body, not a grocery store

Ghislaine Howard- The Washing of Feet (1953)

I heard it recently on a podcast: We have set up church to be so convenient and easy for folks to get their dose of church on Sunday that we have robbed people of the life-changing joy that comes from taking up your cross and following Jesus as part of the body of Christ.

That’s what the church is, the body of Christ.

A Body Not a Grocery Store

We are a body. We need each other. But church in America feels more like a grocery store, than a body. We go there, get what we need, I mean, want, and go home. A body is dependent on all it’s members doing their part. At a grocery store, the manager, clerks and stockers depend on each other to do their part and all the customers depend on the manager, clerks and stockers to do their part so they can go home. In America, the pastor, worship leader, kids ministry leader and staff are the people we church goers depend on to do their part, so we can get what we want and go home.

Maybe that’s why we have celebrity pastors and famous churches. Because the customers like them. They like the products they have. They like their sales and discounts and service. Good message. Great band. Great kids ministry. Great youth ministry…. We consume what the American grocery-store church has to offer and we don’t depend on each other.

Three or four years ago, my church closed its doors. My pastor retired from pastoring and the elders decided to close the church. It was hard. I tried different churches and just felt discouraged. The churches I visited seemed to put out a lot of effort to make their products pallatable and convenient, but there was no blood flowing between us. We weren’t tied together by the sinews and ligaments of the word of Christ, confession of sin, repentance and faith. The costly gospel of Christ laying down his life for me and bidding me to take up my cross and follow him into resurrection life wasn’t held high. Convenient church was. But God was faithful, as he always is, and he led me to Valley Life Surprise, where I saw Jesus, high and lifted up in the preaching. And so there he bid me to die. Not to take what was convient and tasty and go home. But to take up my cross and follow Jesus in the joy of how he redeems people!

It Was Me, Not The Church’s Problem

I feel like I should say here that had I not just taken the convenient grocery store message of the churches I visited and gone home, but had intentionally started laying down my life, investing it in others at those churches, I’m sure I would have found the Body there too. I’m super thankful for Valley Life Surprise, but it’s not that they had the best deal for me that has caused me to love my church. It’s that I started following Jesus again in laying down my life for others at Valley Life Surprise and found myself connected to the Body of Christ.

Why I Stopped Listening to Celebrity Pastors

In those years that I didn’t have a church I listened to John Piper a lot. And I’m thankful for his messages, but shortly after I found my church, I stopped listening to Piper. Not because I don’t appreciate his messages, but because I was consuming them, instead of connecting with the body.

In one sermon my pastor said something like, “Tim Keller or Matt Chandler aren’t going to help you when you’re in need because they’re not here. But your community group will, this local church will.” And it struck me. I had fallen into consuming messages and had become a limp part of the body.

When I stopped listening to celebrity pastors, and started listening to my pastor’s sermons during the week, and started meeting with members of the church for lunch; going to community groups with them, sharing burdens, praying, dreaming, writing curriculum, playing with their kids and talking to them about Jesus, muscle and faith started to grow. When I started spending Saturday nights making communion bread, and 4 hours of my Sundays pouring into moms, dads, kids, grandparents, women, children, teens and even more hours throughout the week opening Bibles and my life up to people I would never have connected with apart from the love of the gospel of Christ, I started to thrive.

There is a real church, a real body of believers who are captivated by Jesus, who have put all their hope in him and are obeying him in taking up their cross and following him. We die a little everyday, but we also become more and more alive everyday. We become more like Jesus because we’re his body. We need each other. We bleed for each other. We feed each other. We comfort each other. We confront each other. We are inconvenienced for each other. We encourage each other. We weep with each other. We laugh with each other. We lay down our lives for each other.

I appeal to you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.

For by the grace given to me I say to everyone among you not to think of himself more highly than he ought to think, but to think with sober judgment, each according to the measure of faith that God has assigned. For as in one body we have many members, and the members do not all have the same function, so we, though many, are one body in Christ, and individually members one of another. Having gifts that differ according to the grace given to us, let us use them: if prophecy, in proportion to our faith; if service, in our serving; the one who teaches, in his teaching; the one who exhorts, in his exhortation; the one who contributes, in generosity; the one who leads, with zeal; the one who does acts of mercy, with cheerfulness.

Let love be genuine. Abhor what is evil; hold fast to what is good. Love one another with brotherly affection. Outdo one another in showing honor. Do not be slothful in zeal, be fervent in spirit, serve the Lord. Rejoice in hope, be patient in tribulation, be constant in prayer. Contribute to the needs of the saints and seek to show hospitality. -Romans 12:1-13

Nurses, you’re doing God’s work!

The idea of serving others in Christianity is unique in that it’s not the lowly who are called to serve because of their low position. The call to serve is for those who would be the greatest.

When Jesus was describing the unique way his people would lead, he said:

“You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great ones exercise authority over them. It shall not be so among you. But whoever would be great among you must be your servant, and whoever would be first among you must be your slave, even as the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.” ‘ Matthew 20:25-28

Christ, the King of kings, said he did not come to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom.

Nurses in pre-structured nursing history were seen as the dregs of society. They were prostitutes and “ignorant [women] who [were] not fit for anything else.” (Draper, 1893/1949, p.51). The idea behind the nurse was that they would have to do what no one of upstanding or honorable report would want to do. No one would want to clean up vomit, or bath a rotting body, or clean an infected would, or wash feces from an elderly persons perineum. The world saw nurses as “low” people fit to do “low” things.

But Jesus said that it’s the great people who do the “low” things. He himself did what the society around him considered menial and too low for a man, much less a rabbi and surely not for the Son of God. He washed the feet of his disciples, including his betrayer. He touched social outcasts with leprosy and applied healing treatments to the eyes of the blind. He spoke to a woman who’s “issue of blood” had separated her from society, called her daughter and healed her.

God’s work, as manifest in his Son, is to go low to lift others up. God doesn’t go low because he’s ignorant or unfit for anything else. He goes to the poor, the outcast, the broken, the ill, the foul-smelling, bleeding, blind, diseased and dying and he reaches into their need to lift them out of despair and hopelessness.

Nurses do God’s work. And they are not ignorant men and women unfit to do anything else. They are honorable, knowledgeable, skilled, professional and educated and from their high position they do a work that is like the work of the Servant-King who laid down his life that others might be healed.

Nurses, we are our patients

Friday the 13th I became a patient at the hospital where I work. I had a robotic total hysterectomy with salpingectomy and cystoscopy. After years of battling endometriosis, and recently bleeding, pain and fibroid issues I decided it was time for the worn out organ to go.

Being on the other side of the patient/nurse relationship is strange. I joked on social media that I felt like a spy. I did, but not with intentions of busting anyone. Just more like an undercover agent gathering intel. I noticed some things I’ll take with me with when I go back to work. The main thing I noticed was the obvious: I was the patient, someone else was my nurse. I bring this up because when you’re the nurse, it’s easy to distance yourself from the patient and when you have to be the patient you get a reminder of how human we all are. Nurses, we are our patients. Our bodies get diseases and we have surgeries, we need medical care. We don’t seek out medical care as much as non-nurses. We tend to care for our own needs and avoid being the patient.

There are many problems in healthcare and nurses feel the weight of those problems. But what motivates us to do the difficult work we do is a genuine care and concern for the health and well-being of people. And those people include us. Nurses, we need to take care of our bodies, because our bodies are the ones caring for other bodies. And we need to embrace, encourage, guide and teach new nurses, because they are taking care of us!

When I was admitted to pre-op on Friday a PCA, new to pre-op checked me in, gave me a warm, anti-microbial sponge bath, and then she realized I didn’t have an armband on. She ran to the desk to print one, verified my name and date of birth and put it on… inside out. She apologized, I assured her it was no big deal. She fixed it and we went on to verifying what I was having done, applying my SCD’s (which by the way I love, and want to own… it’s like a leg massage while you sleep!). Then the overhead announcement came that the hospital is in “downtime”, which means the computers don’t work and you’ll have to document everything on paper. The nurse and PCA bemoaned the fact that this was going to mess their day up, and rushed to print labels so they could draw my blood before the printer stopped working.

In the midst of the nurse and PCA discussing the trouble with their downtime situation, the anesthesiologist popped his head in from behind the curtain, said he’d be doing my anesthesia, had to go to another case first but would be back. He’s the one I was praying for. If the anesthesiologist doesn’t get it right, things go bad fast.

Once the IV was in and the labels were printed and the circulating nurse for the operating room spoke with me, verifying all my important information, the gynecologist doing my hysterectomy came in and sat down on my bed, put her hand on my leg and assured me of what was going to happen and how long and such. My husband left my side with a kiss on the forehead and versed being pushed into my veins. I remember the O.R. Getting on the table, a mask on my face, hearing the voice of my doctor and nurse telling me to go to the beach for awhile. And the next thing I knew I was shivering, moaning and hurting in the recovery room.

In the recovery room for 4 hours, waiting for a bed to open up in the hospital for me, I was in and out of shivering episodes, and drugged sleep. Somewhere in there my doctor talked to me about the surgery… I vaguely remember images on a paper and the word endometriosis.

When I got to my room on the postpartum unit, the pain, shivering and nausea had taken over. Between dry heaves, my nurse asked me the admission profile questions, the lab came in to draw my blood, the CNA took my vital signs, two nurses came to check out my skin and look at my incision sites and noticed that my left hand was very swollen- my IV had infiltrated. And then I had to pee. That didn’t go so good. In fact it didn’t go at all. The nurse called my physician, attempted to drain my bladder with a straight cath (attempted, is the key word here… 3 times to be exact). For the next two hours I tried to breath, reposition myself in some tollerable position in that bed with those flat, plastic pillows and text family members and friends who were wondering how I was. The nurse tried a couple times to start an IV with no success, so the house supervisor came to my rescue with one swift poke to my left bicep. By 9 pm, I was throwing up, still couldn’t pee, three more attempts later, a congregant of nurses had a successfully placed a foley catheter so my bladder could empty. The last time I had that many nurse looking at that part of my body I was having a baby. Humbled, medicated, poked everywhere I could be, I hunkered in the fetal position and prayed for gas to pass, urine to flow and my pain to back off enough that I could sleep a few hours. I got two.

At 6 am, when the Foley catheter came out and the male student nurse came in with his preceptor, the countdown began: When I could pee, eat without puking and walk down the hall I could go home. By noon I had accomplished all three. The discharging nurse reviewed my medications, discharge instructions and precautions with me and my husband wheeled me to the car.

Things have improved tremendously in the past 24 hours. And I’ve been thinking a lot about how nursing is caring for other people. People like me. I’ve run across patients in the hospital who seem to forget their doctor’s and nurse’s are people just like them. They get sick, have headaches, fight diabetes, high blood pressure, endometriosis, cancer, have surgery. They don’t know all the answers. But they are in the position of doctor and nurse to help the person in the bed get to a place where they can go home and feel better. Nurse’s we need to remember our patients are people just like us. Patient’s your nurse is a person just like you. We all have needs at times that require the help of others. The nurses and doctors who cared for me weren’t perfect, but they were caring and did what they could to help me. And I’m so thankful! I needed their help.

When I go back to work in a few weeks I’ll be the nurse not the patient, but being the patient this past week has given me a more relaxed view of what I do. In all the pressure to perform it’s so important to give each other the grace, forgiveness and accountability imperfect people need. Patient’s need our help. And nurses are not perfect. But what we do for our fellow man to help them gain strength, function, dignity… it’s very God honoring. We nurses care for people made in the image of God. And sometimes we’re the people being cared for.