Love you more

“Love you more” she said as I stood in the doorway. I looked back at her, my heart full from the hours spent in the company of a beautiful soul, whose failing body was now confined to a bed in a nursing home. 

From the moment I entered the world, Carol was there. She waited at the hospital for hours late into the night for me to arrive. She was one of the first to hold me after I was born. She joked with me that she was a “McKenzie hog” and would scarcely let me out of her arms for anyone else to hold me. Fiercely loving and fiercely loyal. A protector and a confidant. 

My mom and dad moved to Michigan when my dad took a position as pastor of Grace Missionary Baptist Church in Wyandotte. Carol was one of the people who stepped in and wrapped her loving arms around my parents as they started life in a new city. Carol got my mom a job at the place where she worked and they instantly bonded. Carol became her “Michigan mom”. By the time I was born, about 4 years after my parents arrived in Michigan, Carol was eager and excited to be promoted to surrogate grandma. 

Even though my parents eventually returned to Ohio, Carol remained a part of my life. In recent days, I have returned to words she wrote to me in messages over the years, evidence of the unwavering source of strength and encouragement she was. I am full of gratitude for Carol’s life and that God chose her to be a part of mine. I will carry her with me always and hope to carry on her legacy of love. 

It is fitting that Carol’s last words to me were “Love you more”; it was the anthem of her life. It’s the anthem of Jesus. 

John 15:12-13 “This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends.”

To Live is to Lose

The following is a poem reflective of things I want my patient’s to know. To live is to lose, little things and big ones, but to keep on living in the midst of loss is mercy. Where there is mercy, there is hope:

You didn’t know on my way home, 

I stopped and cried on the side of the road

You didn’t know I stayed late, 

because I wanted you to be ok

You didn’t know throughout the day 

I’d watch your face and pray for grace

To live is to lose little things and the big ones too

To live is to prove all the mercy that surrounds you

New Year; reflection on adventures past and anticipation of adventures to come

7 years ago I stepped off an airplane and into a life I never could have imagined. Togo Africa became my home for the year that followed, a year full of beauty, anguish, insects of various kinds, and an overwhelming sense of the love of God. I served as a nanny for a missionary couple and their five children (which became six children by the time I departed). I was immersed in a culture where people and relationships are prioritized over productivity and where people are saturated with hospitality and open arms. I witnessed missionaries share the gospel of Jesus Christ and saw people physically and spiritually healed. 

Living in such close proximity to a hospital for one year inspired me to go to nursing school when I returned back to the U.S. I have since graduated and have gained a little over three years of experience working as a bedside nurse in Cincinnati, OH. I have recently begun to consider what it might be like to return to Togo, but this time, as a nurse. I reached out to some leaders in Togo and they have extended to me an opportunity to return to Togo for three weeks. The intention of this three week trip is for it to be a time of hands-on and prayerful consideration of whether Togo might be a place where God would have me to serve for a longer period of time, perhaps a one or two year time frame. I have set my heart to earnestly seek the Lord and for the posture of my heart to reflect that of Mary’s in Luke 1:38 “Behold, I am the servant of the Lord; let it be to me according to your word.” I want to be open to the possibility of living in Togo and serving the people as a bedside nurse without neglecting to acknowledge the healthcare needs in America and the opportunities I have to serve right where I am at. 

Please pray with me, that I would be obedient to the Lord, that I would seek Him above all else and that I will be willing to do the tasks that He puts before me with joy. If you wish to partner with me you can do so at https://give.abwe.org/worker/1747 . These funds will go toward a short term trip to Togo to serve at Hopital Baptiste Biblique (HBB), tentatively scheduled for the Spring of 2024.

Everlasting Arms

“Breathe.”

I didn’t realize I had stopped. My sobs were interrupted as I gasped for air, my heart breaking. 

I had never been aware of the impact another soul’s suffering could have on my own. Two years of caring for a patient, and now she was facing the end. I had watched her bravely accept her diagnosis. I had watched her fight through treatment after treatment. I had watched her family stand by her side and fight with her. Now I watched her body being overtaken by a disease. And I couldn’t stop it. 

I had stepped out of her room to grab her a cup of water. On my way, a question from case management interrupted me. I was reminded of some paperwork I had neglected to complete. The question in the hallway had made me stop and, in that brief moment of stillness, I was hit with a force of realization that caused sadness to erupt from the depths of me. I ducked into the nutrition room in an attempt to contain the aftershock of tears that followed.

I had not intended to cry and really didn’t have the time to, but the realization of the nearness of death for my patient, a patient that I had come to know and love so dearly, undid me. I held onto the counter for support as I wept.

The nutrition room door flung open and I felt arms wrap around me. The arms held me as I cried. Someone had chosen to enter into my sorrow right there in the nutrition room and they had cared enough to bear it with me. I was not alone. 

“Breathe.” 

A picture of the love of Jesus Christ; a love that bears our sorrows and enters our pain. “He Himself bore our sins in His body…by His wounds you have been healed.” 1 Peter 2:24-25

Just as the arms of a compassionate soul wrapped around me to comfort me as I wept, how much more is God near to the broken hearted. His arms are everlasting. “There is none like God, who rides through the heavens to your help, through the skies in His majesty. The eternal God is your dwelling place, and underneath are the everlasting arms.” Deuteronomy 33:26

An ode to becoming

I stood with a bag of IV fluids in one hand and a long curled up line of IV tubing in the other. As I prepared to hang the bag of fluids I caught a glimpse of myself in the window of my patient’s room. The bold letters “RN”, emblazoned on my badge, reflected back at me and a jolt of excitement shot through my body. “I’m actually doing it,” I thought, “I’m a nurse.” 

That was two years ago. 

I struggle to communicate an adequate summary or any concluding thoughts on two years spent on the third floor of Mercy West Hospital. In truth, I think an attempt at concluding thoughts might be a bit gauche as Mercy West is now a place that is intrinsic to me, to be carried with me forever. It’s the place I first became a nurse – although, at this point I wonder if you ever become one in a final sense. After two years as a nurse I still feel as though I am becoming one, but, perhaps nursing by nature is a profession of becoming. And even though the following words will not suffice, I feel constrained to make an effort to articulate my gratitude to Mercy West and all it has given me. 

God placed me on a unit with some of the most beautiful, compassionate souls I have ever known. I could not have selected better teachers, confidants or friends. I was met with gentle guidance and strong encouragement each 12 hours shift.

God used the patients He placed in my care to humble me, to inspire me, and to teach me. I learned that each patient interaction is an opportunity to love another human being made in the image of God. 

And now, after two years, I leave behind precious people and the comfort of familiarity for an opportunity to learn and grow in a new environment. The feeling is akin to leaving home for the first time. There is a juxtaposition of emotions in the “in-between” where I now reside: there is a sadness as I say goodbye that makes all the more potent the joy it has been to consider my co-workers on 3west family, and to have a place like Mercy West to call home; the place where it all began. What a remarkable gift to have been given such a solid foundation.

I look back on the past two years with a heart of thankfulness, I look forward with anticipation of what lies ahead, and in the midst of my fear of what is to come, I look up, “I lift my eyes unto the hills, from where does my help come? My help comes from the Lord who made heaven and earth. He will not let your foot be moved, He who keeps you will not slumber” (Psalm 121:1-3). I have known the love of God in His goodness to me, of which these last two years bear witness.

 

Please pray for me as I embark on a new journey at Good Samaritan Hospital where I will be working on a mother/baby unit (a demographic that could not be more different than the one I have worked with the last two years!)

Southeast Asia

I didn’t really want to go. I mean, I did, but that was two years ago, when I was fresh out of nursing school, still brimming with idealistic dreams for what lay ahead. Still basking in the afterglow from having lived a year in Togo, West Africa, I was eager to return to the mission field. Plans to visit a mission hospital in Southeast Asia were interrupted by COVID-19 in 2020, meanwhile, I busied myself with my job as a new nurse. Over the next two years of work, short staffed and overwhelmed, I lulled myself into a state of apathy regarding scripture and missions. I sought comfort in nearly everything but not in the Lord, and became intoxicated by self pity.

In May of 2022 I received the following email:

“I’m writing you today, just in case it’s still there…that lingering restlessness in your mind and heart leading you to seriously explore missions.”

I had nearly forgotten about Southeast Asia. I responded to the email more out of boredom than out of a genuine belief I would embark on this journey. I half-heartedly brought the idea of the trip to my manager, convinced she would say it was impossible for me to go. I was shocked when she approved the trip with enthusiasm. The next thing I knew I was booking flights, secretly hoping for something to interfere with this trip.

Still unconvinced I was actually going to Southeast Asia, I arrived at the Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International airport on October 21st and thought, “Maybe I will miss my connecting flight in Chicago?” After miraculously managing to make my connection in Chicago, I spent 15 hours wedged between two kind, but very large, gentlemen, and was forced to accept my fate; I was on my way to Southeast Asia, by the providence of God alone.

Hot, sticky and tired I stepped into the bustle of Southeast Asia and into a beauty that the limits of language prevent me from fully expressing.

I met people who invited me into their homes and into their lives. Like a sponge, I soaked up all the magic my heart would permit from this corner of the earth.

I met faithful servants of the Lord, humble, kind and wise and was rendered unable to ignore the goodness of the Creator God.

I resisted this trip in nearly every respect. But God purposed in His kindness for me to go to Southeast Asia to learn He is faithful. Proverbs 16:9 [9] The heart of man plans his way, but the LORD establishes his steps. (ESV) The flame of passion for telling people who have not heard about Jesus was reignited in heart; a spark that I first took note of as a little girl as I listened to missionaries who sat at my grandparents dining room table. Thankful that in Jesus I am secure from all alarms and that I am sheltered in His wings of love. So I encourage you, dear reader, let us hold fast the confession of our hope without wavering, for He who promised is faithful (Hebrews 10:23).

Redeeming love has been my theme and shall be until I die.

Greater love

When illness rears its ugly head, it renders its victims perplexed and weakened. As a bedside nurse, I am in awe of the strength my patients exude in the midst of physical and emotional suffering.  

Although our time together is relatively brief, the patients I care for leave an indelible mark on my soul.  

The limits of strength are not known until they are tested. Pain and suffering, like nothing else, strip away the facade of strength and reveal what lies beneath. I have the rare opportunity to watch my patients persevere with confounding grace as they are confronted with debilitating pain and emotional anguish. In their weakness, they reveal their most beautiful selves; raw, courageous and strong.

Patients with particularly destructive illnesses have especially moved me: patients who are in excruciating pain, patients whose minds are warped by dementia, patients who are blindsided by the rapid progression of illness, patients who are faced with hospice care.

Beyond comprehension are patients who, against all odds, choose aggressive treatments rather than comfort measures. Aware of the pain and suffering ahead, they battle on. In the spirit of selfless love, they choose the path of pain. They choose to be wildly uncomfortable for the ones they love. Watching the physical body deteriorate while strength and grace shine brighter from within is a marvelous thing to behold. It is a shadow of sacrificial love, embodied perfectly in Christ himself. 

John 15:12 Jesus says, “This is my commandment that you love one another as I have loved you. Greater love has no one than this than to lay down his life for his friends”. 

My experiences as a nurse in life are but echoes of mercy and whispers of love, the imperfect that speaks of the perfect. While the selfless love of my patients is astounding, the love of God is greater far.

Nursing at the bedside

“What a privilege it is, the work that God has given us Nurses to do, if we will only let Him have His own way with us.” – Florence Nightingale 

Heart pumps blood through networks of veins and arteries, lungs inflate and bring oxygen to perfuse organs, a complex balance of electrolytes, unique souls inhabit and animate each physical body. Numerous physical processes work simultaneously to sustain life. And as a bedside nurse, I see how effortlessly the body’s delicate processes can be interrupted.  

Through failing bodies a soul sparks through, and I fervently fan the life-embers.

Breath labored, brows furrowed, fragile bodies in stiff hospital gowns bravely endure amidst uncomfortable plastic tubes and wires… I look on as precious lives are obscured by disease. I want to obliterate their pain and to restore these beautiful lives to their former selves. It is a sobering realization however that my ability to care for my patients has limits, and that it is not I that has the ultimate capacity to make them well. 

My ability to care for my patients has limits, but God’s care for them is exceedingly greater, it is limitless. It is He who heals all of our diseases, who restores life, who crowns with steadfast love and mercy (Psalm 103:3-5). For this reason, I commit myself and my patients into the hands of one who breathed life into us and who remembers our frailty and cares for my patients abundantly more than I ever can.

So we press on, “conscious that in ourselves we are weak, but that there is a strength greater than our own, ‘which is perfected in weakness’… Do we think of God as the Eternal, into whose hands our patients, whom we see dying in the Wards, must resign their souls – into whose hands we must resign our own when we depart hence, and ought to resign our own as entirely every morning and night of our lives here…?” 

In Isaiah 46:3-4 God says to all who will hear, “Listen to me…who have been born by me from before your birth, carried from the womb; even to your old age I am He, and to gray hairs I will carry you. I have made, and I will bear; I will carry and will save.”

Delight in the beauty of life given by God, and find rest for your weary soul in His strength. 

[Quotations are excerpts taken from Florence Nightingale’s writings to her nurses published in 1914 by Macmillan and Co., Limited St. Martin’s Street, London]

Freedom

Freedom is admittedly a concept I have not yet explored extensively.

I am the daughter of a pastor and somewhere along the way the exhortations to obey God in scripture morphed into a checklist of rules that imprisoned me. Discipline and self-restraint were friends because in my brain freedom was linked with a license to be wildly irresponsible.

Real freedom is the result of forgiveness and faith. And rather than being an obstacle to obedience it is the gateway to it. For the first time I am beginning to understand what freedom actually is.

Faith in Jesus is how sins are forgiven. Forgiveness abolishes the weight of sin and alleviates the guilt that inspires efforts to make oneself worthy of the love of God. The love of God is made evident in this: that while we were still sinners Christ died for us. Freedom from condemnation, freedom from self-saving pursuits, freedom from the weight of failure.

Faith in the complete forgiveness that Jesus Christ has won is the key to freedom. Without forgiveness we are trapped in an endless cycle of vain attempts of self-redemption; desperate efforts to make ourselves worthy.

God has made us worthy. Jesus has set us free.

In Christ, freely gaze upon the glory of the Lord; freely be transformed into His glory.