I’m quickly coming up on my 27th anniversary of doing hospice work and now I’ve already passed the 41 years of ordination; so it would be easy for me to say, “Well,  here are the lessons that I’ve learned and here are the takeaways and more importantly this is what you need to know.”  

Really, this is none of those things; it’s just some insights, maybe some self revelations/realizations that I’ve learned and often, had to re-learn over and over again.

The Biggest: As much as we are the same, we are so individually different; and how I reach one person may not be how I reach another person, no matter what their age, no matter what their sexual orientation or their theological understandings or their socio-economic situation, no matter what their gender or their profession; Everybody is different and yet in so many ways, the same, in this one thing:

Here’s where it gets tricky; sometimes how we are known or what we are called, identified, makes it almost impossible for us to do any of that for another person.

Case in point. I am a minister. I am a hospice chaplain. As soon as you identify yourself with those terms to anybody who asks you what do you, not only do you negate me, but in many ways, people fear me or they may seek me out to do what it is they think that I do or don’t do.          .          .

It doesn’t matter if it’s at the mall or the grocery store or after church on Sunday, at a restaurant or a playground;  it doesn’t matter where you happen to be at any time. If you get identified as a ordained minister or a chaplain, you are going to be viewed in a different way and everything that you say or do after that, is going to be viewed in that manner; good and bad.

So every time I walk into a patient’s room for the first time or call them on phone, I try not to identify myself as the hospice chaplain, but a person who works with the hospice nurse or the social worker or the home health aide so they don’t get the wrong idea of why I’m visiting: TO SAVE THEM from eternal hell and let them know/accept MY JESUS or because they and their situation are so dire, they actually had to send the chaplain in because.        .        .

First and foremost, I see myself as a Companion.  Not a counselor, not as a minister, not as a father confessor, not as an observer, not as a healer, but just as a companion.

HE  was one of those people that fear the most when he heard the word chaplain and minister. Even though I tried to tell him I was not there to pound the pulpit or wave a Bible or to save him for all of eternity but just to be with him and to be of any kind of service that I could for him and his family. His mother was also one of our patients shortly after he became a hospice patient.  When she actually died before him, it had him spiraling into an abyss of withdrawal and mistrust.

 I never passed his room without at least sticking my head in and saying good morning and just asking a simple question of how you’re doing and is there anything I can get for you is there anything I can bring you. 

Sometimes, there wasn’t even an acknowledgment on his end or he would actually turn his head away from me as I would give him a passing, “ just wanted to make sure you are as OK as you could be and I’ll check in on you later.”

Simple, right?

I was shocked one morning when the nurse came and got me and said this particular patient wanted to speak to just me and when I went in I saw him sitting at his bedside table, he was putting together a puzzle and he said I was just the guy he wanted to see.  Even before I had the chance to ask him what he wanted, he was trying to hand me a $20 bill.

He reminded me how I was always asking if there’s anything I could do and now there was actually something.  He wanted me to buy him a battery for his calipers. I told him the money wasn’t necessary and that we may actually have a battery on site that would fit his Electronic calipers.

We didn’t have the proper battery at the front desk where we often keep batteries for hearing aids and other devices, so I decided that I would go out to the store and see if I could pick up the battery myself.

It seemed like it was a lost cause after hitting a couple of different stores, but when I came back from my journeying I actually talked with one of the maintenance people who said, “That’s the kind a battery that you need for calipers, the same kind we have, and we actually have a four pack.”

When I took it to the patient and we together put it in his calipers and saw that it worked, it was as if he just seen a man who had walked on water and calmed the seas;  moved mountains, all by just giving him one simple little battery.

That one simple act has forever changed the relationship that we now enjoy.

If someone thinks you can help or heal them, and you think you can’t, choose their faith over your doubt.

Sometimes, all we need to do sometime is just notice what we recognize.  The simple things most often are what we know, what we know that we know, and actually bet our lives that we know that for the life of us we never ACT LIKE WE KNOW.     .     .

THIS SPECIAL POWER
we all possess:

To merely become what another needs us to be for them
at that moment
and at that time
and that absolutely
no one else could be for them.        .         .

The best part about it is
we don’t have to possess
those magical powers
in order to make sure
that could happen to another person
because of who it is that we are
or aren’t
at that particular moment.           .           .

The Take Away:

And better still: