The people behind the percentages.
I serve at Parkview Regional Medical Center as a chaplain. In that role, all the percentages become people. For example,
Category: practical-ER visits
What not to say after someone dies.
“It IS a good morning.” That’s what the minister said. A woman died an hour earlier. Her death was both
What I learned by being in the hospital
A couple weeks ago, I experienced the hospital from the other side of the bed. I wasn’t the chaplain. I
Navigating hope and despair in ER conversations.
If you’ve sat with a family in an emergency room, you’ve faced hard questions. And you’ve struggled to figure out the way to navigate hope and despair. It doesn’t matter if you are a chaplain or a pastor or a friend that showed up in a hard time. You get questions and you have to answer. Sometimes, it sounds like this.
Practical daily research
How can I get better at pastoral care? I can pay attention to my own practice, my own interactions with husbands and wives, parents and children, moments of excruciating difficulty. In each of those moments (or immediately after) I can ask myself, “What am I learning that will help me with the next one of those moments. What questions can I ask myself and others? What can I learn about attending to bits of information and infusing them back into the care all of us provide?”
When visiting people in the ER, look them in the eyes.
Some of us are squeamish about blood, especially in the hospital. So when we need to visit a friend, family
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