The Baby

Notes from my journal December 2010…

It’s snowing outside right now, and I am drinking hot chocolate eating my Fiber One Bar. Except for the Fiber One Bar, it definitely feels like Christmas. Oh, not the crazy gift-giving, decorating, cookie-making extravaganza. No, I like the baby, the shepherds, the star – the hope.

Those are the things I hang my hat on. Over my twenty years as a parish nurse, I have heard so many stories and seen so many tears (and shed a few myself) that it is the hope in a little baby that keeps me going. Whether it is a young woman dying of cancer or a mother grieving the loss of her son, I just keep thinking about that baby. The infant who grew up to show us the heart of God. How ironic that it is in this powerless and vulnerable infant that we see God’s power. A power that is completely comfortable with those who are suffering. And so, when folks come to me at their most vulnerable, I listen to them and I cry with them, and I see God.