“…they would go from the work of the Father’s creative hands inside of a mother’s womb into the eager reaching fingers of the scribe in the nursing shoes with the RN credentials pinned on her shirt.”
My RN career has been invested mostly in babies, pediatrics, and hospice. I had a doc that used to tease me and say that I “caught em’ coming and going!” While that was a funny way of truth telling I’d like to tell you something else about my nursing career. I was just over twenty years old and in a training program at a hospital when a sweet lady delivered a baby and I was the only one in the room. It was so fast I barely got gloves on before my starched white uniform was christened by bright red blood and amniotic fluid. I was so in awe by what happened that I forgot to announce the sex of the baby! I’ve always loved babies, kiddos, and mamas, and it was a natural identifier to be a “baby nurse.”
When I was still in my teenage years my mom died at home of cancer. Children that are young when a parent dies are thrust into a world of endings just as life is in springtime for them. It often opens a wound that is sometimes never healed and always leaves a deep scar. The pain stayed so fresh for so long that I’d climb the stairs at work just to be sure and avoid “that floor.” Then one day I felt a very distinct calling to hospice work. I hope you’ll forgive my blatant display of selfishness here but I wanted nothing to do with taking care of people who were dying. I was a baby nurse. Babies were my people. But… I soon had a caseload of hospice patients.
What they each taught me about living, L-I-V-I-N-G, radically changed my own journey. Every single life mattered to me so much and I came to love them each so deeplythat I thought I’d fall apart when one of my precious patients died. But, I didn’t. I kept it together. I took care of them. Stayed with their bodies until the funeral home representative and I exchanged signatures, and then I went to Walmart. Or Target. Or a loud busy coffee shop. Anywhere there were people fully immersed in the business of living. I never bought a thing-I just allowed myself to be reminded that living was still happening and I was still on this side of heaven, and the Lord still had need of me right here and right now.
And one day-after a beautiful soul passed from the grip of my hands and into the embrace of the Lord-the Lord released me from hospice work and I went right back to chubby cheeks and sticky fingers and little ones who don’t know any better than to sneeze right in my face and laugh about it. ❤️
But He also put a pen in my hand and I began to write. I wrote for myself, I wrote for others, I told stories of warning and tales of wonder and one day I knew that my new job was to be a scribe. I know authors and I know writers and I stand in amazement of them but me, I’m just a plain ole’ scribe that still occasionally slips on a pair of nursing shoes and pins RN credentials to a uniform. What God does with this next season, well I can’t wait to know!
Oh, before I go, the catching em’ comin’ and goin’ part… that has always been exactly how I saw it. As a woman, and as a nurse I am incredibly honored and humbled that beautiful lives went from the touch of my earthbound hand to the grasp of the hands that carry nail scars. And that they would go from the work of the Father’s creative hands inside of a mother’s womb into the eager reaching fingers of the scribe in the nursing shoes with the RN credentials pinned on her shirt.