A hospital chaplain, wife, and stepmom learning (and unlearning) about life, death, God, myself, and other things along the way
In May of 2007, just after finishing divinity school, I went with a group of about fifty classmates and a few professors on a tour of Israel and Egypt. Seeing the places where so many of the stories I had read in the Bible took place – some of them very little changed by the passage of centuries – was powerful stuff. My mind always returns there at this time of year. This is what I wrote in my travel journal the day we visited Gethsemane: Continue reading “Where God Was Alone and Afraid”
He was much too old for lullabies, already a teenager. If he had been able to speak, he may have protested, but I doubt it. His mother lay in the hospital bed next to him, wrapped her arms around him. A few hours earlier, she had been full of anxiety and anger, lashing out at anyone who so much as hinted that her son was dying. But I did more than hint. I confronted her with the reality that he was coming to the end, and that he needed her now as much as ever. The anger exploded — then disappeared. And in her son’s last hours, she did as good a job of anyone I’ve ever seen at saying goodbye. She told him she loved him, that every day with him was a gift, and then for a painfully long time, she sang him to sleep. She made sure that the last sound he would hear was not beeping monitors or her anguished sobs or his own raspy final breaths, but that first sound — his mother’s voice, singing to him the same songs she had sung when he was a baby. Continue reading “Endings and Beginnings”
Sometimes I get to the point where I think I’ve seen it all. And then I walk into a patient’s room to see several leeches on him. I’ll admit, I got a little woozy. In theory, I knew that leeches are still used in modern medicine, but I had never actually seen it until recently. I’m guessing this is not what the patient expected when he checked into a Western hospital in the year 2014. But healing can take some unexpected, and rather uncomfortable, paths. Continue reading “Do You Want to Be Made Well?”
Here we are about halfway through Lent, and it feels like I have skipped right over to Good Friday and the darkness of the tomb. This has been a really, really tough few weeks. I won’t pretend to know how much of that I caused, how much God caused, how much was coincidence, and how much was a result of the changes I chose to make for Lent this year. There were a few doozies. And by far the most difficult Lenten discipline has been doing one thing. Just one thing. The idea came to me a week or so before Ash Wednesday, when I was thinking about what I needed to give up for Lent, what would really challenge me and help me make space in my life for God to fill. At the moment I had this thought, I was on the couch, “watching” The Daily Show, while I played Candy Crush, in between texts with my best friend, checking Facebook and email every time my phone buzzed with a notification alert. Continue reading “Falling”
I have such mixed feelings about the holiday season that, I’ll admit, when one particular Christmas song comes on the radio, I change the words a little and sing, “It’s the most ambivalent time of the year!” I love Christmas, don’t get me wrong. I’m usually the first in my neighborhood to put up Christmas lights, and I look forward all year to my annual holiday party. But the past few years especially, I’ve been feeling kind of left out of Christmas. I hear all the songs on the radio, and watch all the movies, and see all the commercials, and walk past the greeting card aisle, and I get the impression that Christmas isn’t for people like me. It’s for people surrounded by big families, not for those of us who live alone with a dog and have family living hundreds of miles away. It’s for people whose gloriously romantic (and ridiculously wealthy) significant others buy them diamond jewelry and new cars with huge red bows on them, not for those of us without a significant other and living paycheck to paycheck. Most of all, it’s for people who are happy, and there are plenty of days that’s just not me. Continue reading “Ambivalence and Joy: Advent 3”
This month marks the one-year anniversary of the release of The Modern Magnificat: Women Responding to the Call of God. I’m proud to be one of the women who contributed a ministerial calling story to this collection edited by Jennifer Harris Dault. I was discussing the book, and my calling, with a friend recently, as we were both reading Sarah Bessey’s new book, Jesus Feminist: An Invitation to Revisit the Bible’s View of Women. An acquaintance walked by and overheard us. “Another book about women?” he said laughingly. “Didn’t you just go hear some other author talk about this same thing?” He was referring to a convocation with Rachel Held Evans I attended in September, at which she discussed her book, A Year of Biblical Womanhood. “That’s an important issue, I know. But there are other things the church needs to focus on,” he said. “Why do we need to keep having the same conversation?” Continue reading “Why We Still Need to Have This Conversation”
A few days ago, I got my hands on Sarah Bessey’s new book, Jesus Feminist. I’m excited to be part of Sarah’s synchroblog with (as of this writing) around 45 others to celebrate the release of the book. This is the (relatively) short version of why I’m a Jesus Feminist. Continue reading “I Was Told to Knit While the Men Prayed”
Recently, a friend of a friend asked me a question about death. She is a new employee at a hospital in another state. Though we haven’t seen each other in years, she remembered that I was a chaplain, got my number from our mutual friend, and wanted to talk. “I’m not a religious person,” she began. “I’m not even sure I believe in God. But if there is a God, I need to know if he’ll judge me for this. I’ve killed three people already.” Confused, I asked her to explain about these killings. She told me how she had been the one to remove the breathing tubes and turn off the ventilators for three terminal patients. “I know it’s my job,” she said. “And it’s what the families decided to do, and the patients probably would have died anyway. But they died sooner because of me, you know? I’m the one who took them off the vent. They stopped breathing at that moment because of me. Will God punish me for that?” I could hear the tremor in her voice. “I wanted to do this job to help people. And I do. I help a lot of people. But I didn’t count on being the actual instrument of death for some patients, you know? I don’t know how to deal with that.” Continue reading “Worse Than Death?”
“It’s your turn next!” my friend told me, less than a week after her wedding. I was amazed at the speed with which one can go from Singleton to Smug Married. (Sorry if much of my vocabulary in this arena is informed by the Bridget Jones books and movies. Okay, I’m not really sorry; I love them.) I wanted to remind her of how much we hated it when other people said such things to us back when we were both single, but I bit my tongue. “Have you tried that website?” she asked, and proceeded to tell me about a Christian dating site. You know the one. You’ve seen their commercials, in which ridiculously photogenic couples hold hands and frolic chastely and talk about how God meant for them to find one another, all to the sound of a song which is actually about falling in love with Jesus, not finding your schmoopie. No, I told her. I haven’t and will not try that one. Based on the commercials and what I’ve heard from friends who have tried it, I don’t think their particular brand of Christianity fits me at all. I deplore the idea of “finding God’s match for me,” as if there’s one guy out there God designed to fit me, and my ultimate purpose in life is to find him. I don’t buy that. Continue reading “On Not Finding God’s Match For Me”
As you might have guessed if you’ve read any of my other blog posts, my job can be pretty stressful at times. Those of us in caregiving professions can easily become exhausted — physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually — by the constant demands of helping others. Sooner or later, inevitably, we will experience what is known as compassion fatigue. It happened to me during my first year as a staff chaplain. (Actually, I’m sure it was happening to me during CPE as well, but it just felt like part of the gauntlet of that year of chaplain residency that we all had to endure!) I had not yet learned to recognize the signs. I was not getting enough sleep. I was eating unhealthy foods at strange times of day. For a while, I would burst into tears whenever anyone outside the hospital asked me how I was doing, because I was working so hard to keep my emotions in check at work. Continue reading “What’s Saving My Life This Week”
Stacy N. Sergent 