Category: Hospital Notes
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Hospital Notes #3: What a wonder to be wrong!
I was called to pray for a baby who was dying. When I am on call, I take the Pastoral Care Department cell phone home with me, so I had forty-five minutes to get to the hospital. I told that to the nurse, quickly dressed, and started flying toward I-95. When I arrived in the…
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Hospital Notes #2: Children are much harder to hate
People often ask me if my job is hard. I am a chaplain in a children’s hospital and they presume difficulty. “How can you stomach all that suffering?” — the subtext of their honest question: “Do you like your job?” My answer: “I couldn’t say I like it; but I think it pleases God, and…
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Hospital Notes #1: You’re a bigger deal than you think.
I state my esteem for you because I believe that we too, even as strangers, can participate in the love-life of all things, the center of the universe, God, whenever we love.
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Working With Worry
Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own. – Jesus (Matthew 6:34) Recently I was talking to a mother in the cardiac intensive care unit and I stumbled across a new insight about worry in Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount: Don’t forget to…
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To the End — A Christmas Story
I’m beginning my time at Nemours Children’s Hospital. Moving into chaplaincy again, this story came to mind. I wrote it about my first experience of death in the hospital one December many years ago. It’s almost all true, but none of the names are. May what needs to be unmade in you die this winter,…
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A Short Story for All Saints Day
Remembering Peter A short story for All Saints Day As the elevator door slid open I instinctively started to step off but quickly balked as I realized we were only at the second floor. I shuffled my forward step sideways and made room for a familiar faced man to sidle into place in the front…
Today, if you hear his voice 