11:11 pm on a Thursday night, and I find myself here again. It\’s been a long time. I\’m tired. The kids haven\’t been sleeping very well, one is teething, the other is transitioning to a bed he can get out of easily, so our nights are interrupted. I don\’t think I\’ve had a full night\’s sleep in over a month.
And yet.
I find myself here. Tired, sleepless, yet eschewing my bed for the \”comfort\” of a thinly cushioned dining room chair, cold toes, and the warmth of letters beneath my fingers, waiting to be scooped up and placed where my mind\’s eye has envisioned for them to be
I\’ve been greedy lately. I find myself grasping for time. I have a beautiful family. I\’m happily, joyfully, hilariously married. My time is taken up by the people I love most, the people who matter to me more than all the earth together. I wish I could give them more time.
But I choose with this post to keep stealing more time for myself. I want to put words to a page, to grasp my thoughts and peel at their layers until I can see them neatly arranged in front of me. But I want to be purposeful with this time.
So in this meandering first post of what I hope are many, but hopefully more intentional posts, I want to write out the things I want to explore here. Let\’s get down to business.
I\’ve worked as a nurse in an integrative outpatient oncology unit since November of 2014. Before that, I had worked in a hospital setting for about 2 years. The two years that I worked in the hospital made me realize that the thing I wanted to do was prevent people from going into the hospital.
Now, it\’s been several years since that realization. I got married, I had kids, I moved a lot, and I find myself looking to explore. What do I really want to do? What am I interested in? How do I find where I want to go?
Here are a few of the convictions/beliefs/ideas I left the hospital setting with:
I believe that God calls us to stewardship of the resources he gives us. I focus here on the resource that is our own bodies.
I believe that stewardship of the body is an act of worship that can increase one\’s capacity to love God and love one\’s neighbors more fully.
I believe that the church has the potential to stand as an example of what it looks like to steward our bodies well through health-centered ministries.
I (personally) want to find out if faith community nursing is where I want to be.
There are probably better ways I could have worded everything here, but here\’s where I\’m at. And I want to use this place as a starting point. Where do I go from here? I will be reading, researching, exploring, and experimenting based on the few statements above. I will try to do this with more structure and intention than the way I used to write before.
But for now… I think I\’ll go to sleep and start again tomorrow.