One of the continually amazing things in this process I’ve been in for some years now, of discernment and postulancy, has been how, just when everything seems the most messy, God steps in and sees to it that I get fed. This week, it was in the form of three Skype calls and one live lunch. Continue reading
Back in the day, if you were a Mac user, you learned that every now and then on the old System 6 that you needed to defragment your hard drive now and then, or your files got all wonky, wouldn’t open, or even worse, disappear.
This week, things, for lack of a better term, have felt like my hard drive is fragmented. My week moves from “The thing I know the least” to “the thing I know the most.” I suppose I AM grateful it runs that direction rather than the other. Continue reading
“It’s always something,” is one of my mantras as I continue to adjust to living a triple part-time life…and I simply am going to have to accept there will always be encroachments of the other two roles in my life in the one I am in, during the present moment. So the mantra becomes something a little more like “It’s always something, and, furthermore, there’s always gonna be something.” Yet there is still the reactive moment of irritation when I see a call on my phone from the hospital operator back home when I’m on my CPE rotation, or the call from someone at church when I am trying to study for my Old Testament class. Continue reading
Lately, I’ve been amazed at how much pondering happens in my mind as I go from CPE session back to my ordinary life (Well, if you can call my life these days “ordinary”.) One of the things that has been happening has been that the sights, the sounds, the hubbub of a larger hospital has re-engaged long-dormant memories of working in a larger hospital setting. It has also pushed at me to re-think decades old narratives. Continue reading
This week seemed to be about re-discovering small hidden things–mostly related to old habits when I was in training and on staff at the University of Missouri. Now, that’s a long time ago–I left there in June 2000. But as I was walking down the hall, all of a sudden I realized I was at least 4 steps ahead of our group. In a 245 bed hospital, I had picked “the walk” back up. The walk where I had some place to go, and I simply plowed on ahead at a fast clip and zig-zagged past people walking in the main corridor. I felt a little sheepish when I realized what I had done. Continue reading
By only the 2nd week of CPE (28 weeks to go!) I was already having that “urrrhhhhmmmm” feeling when one of my instructors says, “Maria, I’m going to put you on the hot seat.”
The truth is, CPE is designed to make you uncomfortable. It’s designed to press your theological boundaries. It’s designed to help you understand where your most closely held beliefs come from. This is because of the importance of keeping “your stuff” out of pastoral ministry, and specifically to focus on the needs of, in this case, the patient. Continue reading
Today is the first day of my not working on Wednesdays on a regular basis, as I move into this phase of life I’m calling my “multiple part-time life.” Continue reading
Today was 90% orientation and 10% starting to get to know each other and understand what is expected when someone from the chaplain’s office enters the patient care area. Of course, one of the first things was the name badge (those are holographs on the badge, BTW, that show up when I take the picture), and starting to get a feel for the patient care areas. Mostly I thought about how it was 15 years since I’ve worked in a large hospital. Continue reading
I am two days away from the start of CPE and something happened this week that has made me ponder the concept of insulation. Continue reading
In eleven days, my world is going to become very strange. Continue reading
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