Author / Michael

Unknown's avatar

Posts by Michael

I am a husband, father, minister, and writer.
by Michael

My Blog: Trauma 3

When we were checking in with each other the Wednesday after Election Day, my supervisor described our having been through a trauma. Traumas take some getting used to. He said in swift Strening fashion, “It takes time to learn what can be trusted.”

Perfect. Accurate. Compelling. I thought at the time how grateful I was for his supervision, for his way of putting things, and for his open spirit that feels. He is as great a pastor as he is a supervisor. And there he was summing up a decisive collective experience. Trauma.

I’ve learned in CPE that traumas take many forms. They are often unexpected. They leave us feeling brutalized and sometimes tired, spent. Traumas require a response when we have little energy for it. Traumas pull the soul through thick, murky sludge, and no matter when we emerge, we’ll be different.

The look of it will be up on us. The smell of it distinct. Trauma can’t remain hidden. At least at first. Naming it for what it is helps.

Calling an election trauma matters. Distinguishing the singular event – that had all those earlier moments attached it – as trauma separates it and brings it to our collective consciousness for what it is.

As you recover, take the time you need. Visit the reality of what’s happened in our country. See the fractures and fears. Witness the same in you. Slow down to appreciate how hard life is for you and for us. It will take time to learn what can be trusted.

by Michael

My Blog: Trauma 2

The quickest responders are the ones who count. That’s what I usually say to myself.

Those are the medical personnel. Together, the team is between 15-20 people: physicians and nurses and respiratory techs. Security and a chaplain and a hospital administrator. We rush within minutes from all quarters in the hospital.

The medical folks address the medical crisis. They attempt to stabilize the patient all while deciding if and where the patient will be moved to a different unit in the hospital.

That could mean transporting someone from the lobby to the Emergency Department. It could mean a patient, once stabilized, is taken from a medical floor to one of the intensive care units. In most cases, movement for the patient is presumed. Even if it takes time to accomplish.

Chaplains come with the primary focus on the family in order to support anyone present who may be with the patient and with a secondary concern for our care providers. Watching trauma unfold is its own participation in trauma.

Participating in trauma does things to people. It anchors you and disrupts you. Both happen. In a trauma, someone else’s and your own, the world that you knew flips.

Time changes. People move quickly and they don’t move quickly enough. The room is noisy and the floor cluttered with needle caps and clothes and ripped packages that once held tubes and lines and other medical implements.

It is an essentially upsetting, unsettling, and uprooting experience. Have you experienced something like this? Perhaps not a medical crisis but another version of trauma? What’s helped?

by Michael

My Blog: Prayer for the Week

An Asaph Psalm (Message Translation)

77:1 I yell out to my God, I yell with all my might,
    I yell at the top of my lungs. He listens.

2-6 I found myself in trouble and went looking for my Lord;
    my life was an open wound that wouldn’t heal.
When friends said, “Everything will turn out all right,”
    I didn’t believe a word they said.
I remember God—and shake my head.
    I bow my head—then wring my hands.
I’m awake all night—not a wink of sleep;
    I can’t even say what’s bothering me.
I go over the days one by one,
    I ponder the years gone by.
I strum my lute all through the night,
    wondering how to get my life together.

7-10 Will the Lord walk off and leave us for good?
    Will he never smile again?
Is his love worn threadbare?
    Has his salvation promise burned out?
Has God forgotten his manners?
    Has he angrily stalked off and left us?
“Just my luck,” I said. “The High God goes out of business
    just the moment I need him.”

11-12 Once again I’ll go over what God has done,
    lay out on the table the ancient wonders;
I’ll ponder all the things you’ve accomplished,
    and give a long, loving look at your acts.

13-15 O God! Your way is holy!
    No god is great like God!
You’re the God who makes things happen;
    you showed everyone what you can do—
You pulled your people out of the worst kind of trouble,
    rescued the children of Jacob and Joseph.

16-19 Ocean saw you in action, God,
    saw you and trembled with fear;
    Deep Ocean was scared to death.
Clouds belched buckets of rain,
    Sky exploded with thunder,
    your arrows flashing this way and that.
From Whirlwind came your thundering voice,
    Lightning exposed the world,
    Earth reeled and rocked.
You strode right through Ocean,
    walked straight through roaring Ocean,
    but nobody saw you come or go.

20 Hidden in the hands of Moses and Aaron,
You led your people like a flock of sheep.

by Michael

My Blog: Trauma 1

In our hospital when a trauma happens, a page is sent through the system to a team. Chaplains are part of the rapid response team so our on-call chaplain gets the page and responds within 5-10 minutes to the scene. The same team responds to cardiac arrests and visitors who fall unconscious unexpectedly on the campus.

Because our hospital campus includes several buildings over several city blocks, it can take time to arrive to a trauma. It may take effort to leave a conversation that you’re in as a spiritual caregiver, for instance. A doctor may need to leave a patient’s room immediately. A nurse may need to grab a crisis cart and place some things in the hands of a colleague.

Some trauma calls turn out to be seizures, relatively bland events for the amount of resources “coming at a person” when the page is called. Still, being a part of a rapid response assumes a readiness to encounter the worst. It assumes that we’re prepared to stick around and labor through what’s next.

A family who’s grieving demonstrably. A patient who is unaccompanied and whose chest is being pumped, whose ribs are being broken. Being there assumes that we’ll see and that’ll we’ll do our work. That we’ll be steady.

It is its own walk of faith, responding to those traumas. You know and don’t know what you’ll see. Being steady is a hard job when pain is winning. How do you keep yourself steady? How do you see the traumas unfold and still show up?

 

 

by Michael

My Blog: Waiting

I have occasion to stand as a witness before, after, and when people die. The first time this happened, in my residency year two years ago, I was in the medical intensive care unit where I still spend most of my time as a chaplain.

I sat with a sister as her brother died. He was a scientist, believed nothing about the supernatural, and sitting with his sister was undoubtedly a holy moment to me. We talked together, mostly her talking and me listening. She laughed as she told stories.

Explaining that she had never imagined being a sister in this way, I heard her walk through the upset of thinking it’d be the other way around, that he would be the one who watched her breathe her last breaths. She was faithful to him in those last moments. “I won’t ask you to pray,” she had said earlier that morning. “But will you come back and wait with me?” Waiting is what I did.

by Michael

My Blog: Rested

I was reading KevinMD, a physician’s newsletter, that comes to my inbox. It’s a regular list of interesting articles discussing the ways physicians and care providers practice.

Among the recent posts was one about sleep deprivation and how necessary a culture shift is for doctors, those in training and those teaching. It made the point that working up to 100-hour weeks is unhealthy. Sleep is a medical necessity.

This is something I’ve wondered about with the healthcare professionals I’ve served as a pastor. Further, they and the blog have me thinking about what’s necessary for me to get rest, what’s necessary to my feeling rested, and what by virtue of my choices exhausts me.

Perhaps good posts like those on KevinMD’s blog will get us to thinking about how to support our care providers and how to live healthy lives.

by Michael

My Blog: Prayer of the Week

Sift through the garbage inside us so that when we seek ourselves, we find treasures. Search us and shine your light through us so that we can see ourselves as sparkling vessels capable of repeating the amazing in our work.

You made us. You crafted us. You held us. You called us into being. You celebrated over us. Yours was the first voice blessing and singing and weeping joyful tears.

Enable us to organize and structure our days after the blessings you speak. Grant us the courage to step one step after another in full view of your goodness. Give us the gifts to nourish the world, to use them for good, and to compliment ourselves and you with big, bright smiles.

by Michael

My Blog: Offer a Blessing

Henri Nouwen said that a blessing is a word that is good for you to hear. As I chaplain, I offer blessings to people, and I facilitate people offering blessings to people. Another word for blessing is benediction.

Usually I do this in critical situations, in situations where death is coming soon. Sometimes I get to do this for newly born children, for couples, and for families.

I often tell people that blessing is a word you want to say to someone you care about. It is a word, phrase, sentence, or image that you want to share with a person and with God.

A blessing can be a prayer and vice versa, but a blessing doesn’t have to be directed to God. You can bless others.

Think of a person you’d like to bless. What’s something you want them to hear and an impact upon you that they’ve made? Put it all together, and risk offering it.

by Michael

My Blog: Good Decisions

I was in a room listening to physicians talk about intensive care and how timelines were important to patient care and to providing health care. Patients get better when they’re treated. Or they don’t.

If they get better, doctors know why. And the same is true if patients don’t get better. If certain things were going to happen, like recovery, then they would have happened.

The importance of recognizing that trend along with all the other information available is freeing. It can free you to choose well. It can enable a person to have a good death and a good life in the sense that there’s life to live after the next decision.

by Michael

Cheering for Whoever’s Winning

This will not sound like the post of a baseball lover, especially a Chicagoan who’s surrounded by blue and red and W flags. In fact, I’m not a sports fan by any metric. But I love when people say things worth keeping.

The other morning I was talking to a co-worker and she said that she was a fan of all our city’s teams. Then, after naming them, she said, “I cheer for whoever’s winning.” What a perspective.

It isn’t the diehard viewpoint of many Cubbies. It isn’t the cool waning perspective of those who loved Michael Jordan (and Scottie Pippen and on down the roster) more than they loved basketball. It’s a larger, more generous one.

Consider it: cheering for whoever’s winning. It seems that mindset could make a person’s soul bigger.

by Michael

My Blog: Prayer for the Week

Yesterday stays with me, with us. And for some of us countless ideas run around in our heads, many of them from before.

For others of us the struggle is to start seeing anything at all. We have so much to do. It feels that way. Where do we start?

Grant us the ability to see when our heads are clouded, the ability to hear what’s just beyond our ears, and the ability to put enough form to our spirit’s hope.

Help us hold life gently. Help us appreciate and respect the models you’ve given our world, the idea generators, the storytellers who help us stay.

Amen.

by Michael

My Blog: Sparkling Eyes

When I heard your explanation of your new position, it made me leap inside my heart. I can see you being a chaplain over there, seeing your patients, pushing the borders of your pastoral identity. I could see you praying and preaching and leading.

Your eyes sparkled as you spoke. I noticed it even though I kept my listening face. I guarded the treasure of your brightened countenance. I thought of the other residents and students in our CPE program. I thought of my chaplain colleagues and the pastors I know who are open to call. I saw them and the fulfillment of their hopes in your sparkling eyes.

You weren’t entirely happy with everything–and who’d expect that given your description of the social climate of the place–but you possessed a vision of what could be. That’s what came through your speech, through your eyes.

The vision of your next days, the long moments with others where you’d have an impact, where you’d do some more good in the world. Good for you. Good for them. Good for us.