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Nursing and The Name III: Gossip
Here is the thing about nursing: I recently called it a beautiful disaster of a career. It was just something that came to me, but the more I think about it, the more I believe it to be true. Nurses can get really bogged down with the day to day. From working shifts, to bullying, to mental health issues, there is no shortage of challenges that nurses face just to come to work, let alone deal with the complex health needs of their patients. But some of the big problems that come up aren’t the result of the work, but of human brokenness. Man, can you see that brokenness in…
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New Year, Same God
It is a brand new year, and you know what that means! We all have a renewed sense of self and are ready to take on new adventures, fully confident in who we are and what we have become! …..of course I’m kidding. Most likely, we have all decided that this will finally be our year. We are going to make real changes this time. It’s allllllll going to be different. Here is the thing about different. It’s not always good. Before you start listing all the ways in which you need to change to meet the new year, take a minute to list out the gifts and talents that…
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Nursing and the Name: Blog Series Coming Soon!
Friends, I’ve been having a hard time sitting down and writing lately. I feel like I haven’t had much direction with my posts and started to wonder why I was bothering to write disjointed ramblings on issues I thought relevant for Christian Nurses. As I do, I took it to the big guy. I asked the Lord to reveal to me what it is He wants me to write about and that is when this blog series came to mind. Nursing and the Name is all about how we nurse in the secular world. The vast majority of us will not work at faith based institutions where we are allowed…
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A Letter to Christian Second Wives
Dear Friends, I have a confession. I have a secret. A secret so well hidden that I literally forget about it …constantly: I am a second wife. My husband was 21 years old when he married his first wife. This isn’t my story to tell, apart from saying that both his priest and my pastor saw that the dissolution of the marriage was biblically justified, and so I won’t get into the details. Plus, this isn’t about him, this is about us. You and me. I met my husband shortly after his marriage ended and things got serious pretty quickly. It became clear that, despite obvious complications, we could not live without…
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Exchanging Busyness for Holiness
I’ve had a bad week. One of those weeks where you seem to be so bad at absolutely everything you do that you wonder why God called you to get out of bed in the mornings. Oh right, because I have three little humans that I have to keep alive. These days I am a lot more focused on mommy-hood than nursing as I’m on mat leave from my casual position. And yet I am so much more busy now than I was when I was working. Moving from 2 kids to 3 definitely plays a big role in it my busyness, but I have also taken on so many other…
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Competition and the Lie of the Finite
“The atmosphere of competition is overwhelming,” a friend recently said when we were talking about her professional situation. Mix that with having several friends over the past few weeks tell me that they felt as though they were in direct competition with other nurses for promotions or job opportunities and we seem to have a problem here. Where are we left, as nurses, when competition sneaks into our profession? I’m not immune to these feelings of intense competition. There have been lots of times when I felt less than or left out when someone else has gotten a job I wanted, or started a masters program, or been recognized within…
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Running a race against myself (and I’m losing)
Friends, I feel like I am running a race that I am doomed to lose. Do you ever feel this way? Like you are running, you feel like you are hitting your stride and then all of a sudden, you notice that the scenery isn’t changing, and you’re not actually moving forward. You’re stuck. And heaven forbid you look down, because then, BAM, you fall flat on your face. This is how I have been feeling about this blog. For a while now, I have had the feeling that the Lord is calling me to go into ministry, but I am scared. S-C-A-R-E-D. I have a career that I, well, I…