SchneiderWeb

I just remembered that today was the day of the NYC Gay Pride Parade, pretty much the only parade I ever enjoyed watching, but that's what having your parents march in it will do for you. Talk about pride! By pure coincidence (although as a Calvinist I don't put much stock in coincidence), I logged on now to post about an incredibly courageous pastor I read about. He took a stand for gay rights, even as it cost him much of his congregation. You can read about Rev. White here . For those with shorter attention spans, there's also a video here . Rev. White has until June 30 to pay some $200K in debt on the church or its doors will close permanently. Some will see that as God's providence, along with the loss of membership since he "came out" in support of marriage equality. Such thinking mistakes failure for defeat. It's the same thinking that demanded that Jesus come down from the cross "to prove" that he was truly the Messiah. That he failed...

The past three weeks of chaplaincy have taught me a twofold lesson regarding the word "no." First, I have an inability to say it when someone asks something of me. For example, although the CPE supervisor advised all of the chaplains not to give out our phone numbers, I gave my number to the secretary on the floor of the ICU, who asked for it when I introduced myself as the chaplain for the unit. That very day she called me with a pastoral care emergency. The reason for the caution around giving out our numbers is that 1) we can be paged, and 2) the secretaries may assume that we're available 24/7, which is not the case. On the flip side, I have learned not to immediately accept "no" for an answer. There have been a few occasions where I have introduced myself to patients as the chaplain and received a polite "no thank you" in response to my invitation to talk. Patients have all sorts of pre- and misconceptions of what it is I'm there to do, whi...

The clinical pastoral education (CPE) program I'm involved in is a 10-week intensive program. "Intensive" is meant to describe the condensed nature of squeezing 400 hours of CPE into 10 weeks. By contrast, the extended program fits the same number of hours into 8 months--a few hours here, a few hours there. During the summer, however, each day is a grind. I come home exhausted yet satisfied. Many nights I go to bed before 10:00 and wake up before 6:00 to try to fit in a run, knowing that I'll be too exhausted to exercise by the time I get home. While "intensive" may describe the act of completing 400 hours of CPE in 10 weeks, the program is also emotionally intensive. My first patient visit was an end-of-life situation in which the family was planning to withdraw life support from the family matriarch. They had requested a pastoral care visit, to which another chaplain and I responded. My colleague "C" led the family in prayer, after which they a...

Two days ago I began a summer intensive unit of clinical pastoral education, or CPE, as its commonly known. I'll spend the next ten weeks serving as a full-time chaplain at Capital Health. Capital Health operates two hospitals: one in Trenton and one in suburban Hopewell. They are about 5 miles--and for all intents and purposes--a world apart from each other. Trenton is urban, older, bigger, busier, and a full-on trauma center, meaning patients with any type of traumatic injury (e.g., accident, gunshot) can receive care. Hopewell is brand-spanking new, with every modern convenience, including a spa, and is surrounded by lush, rolling hills. Given its setting and the fact that it's not a trauma center, the atmosphere at Hopewell is more like a hotel than a hospital. I'm one of seven interns in the program. I don't think I could ask for a better group. We're a diverse lot in age, race, country of origin, faith background, and personality, but not so much gender (six...