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How To Pray Before Starting a Clinical Day
Folks, I am so excited to announce that I am going to be working for a local University in the fall as a clinical educator! I am also going to be working in the simulation lab for an intensive palliative care course. I can’t wait to get back to being with students, which has to be my favourite part of nursing. So, in light of this, I was thinking back to my student nurse days and how I used to prepare for the start of my clinical day. This almost always included prayer. Here are a few prayers you can pray before you start your clinical day: The Lord’s Prayer…
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Dear Nursing (A Love Letter)
Dear Nursing, Why you gotta be like this? I kid. I love you. But you are hard and you make me crazy. I have tried in earnest to quit you because I thought that is what was best. I genuinely believe that God asked me to lay you down and walk away. I prayed and prayed that He would let me take you back because surely we are meant to be together. But sadly, thats not the case. Don’t get me wrong. I have a job. Two new jobs, in fact. In nursing! I’m going to be working shifts and learning new skills and walking with people through their health…
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Things I Suck At: Purpose
I mentioned in another post that I have been really focused on purpose lately. I’ve felt completely restless and like I was being called to something, with zero clue as to what that something could be. So I started seeking out Christian resources on purpose in an attempt to maybe once and for all figure myself out. I started off with Annie F. Down’s 100 Days to Brave which is, you guessed it, a 100 day devotional. It was great and I recommend it, but it didn’t quite go deep enough. It did have some really great insights like listening to ideas that pop into your head because those ideas…
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I’m Quitting Nursing.
Lately I’ve been really focused on purpose. How does what we do here on earth work towards God’s kingdom? How am I going to spend these short days that I have here, pursuing God’s glory? In this search, I started reading the book Made for This by Jennie Allen. One of the things Allen talks about is laying everything before the Lord, and being willing to follow Him anywhere. I felt so confident that I had done this. Over and over again I offered prayers of thanksgiving and devotion where I would say “I will go wherever you lead me Lord, everything I have is yours” and then in the…
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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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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…
