Emotion
People have often told me “I could never do that” when I tell them I’m an ER nurse. I need to start asking them what they mean. Because I’m starting to wonder if they also criticize me for the same qualities I need in order to accomplish my job.
I have to push past my emotion to make a decision and complete an action. I have to watch people suffer and even die without being ruled by emotions. I have to get extremely angry at seeing a teenager slap his mother and continue to care for him as my patient. I give narcotics to drug abusers and have to treat them with patient satisfaction scores in mind. Their rating of my interaction with them could cause me to lose my job. I have to stick needles into babies while they and their parents cry, but I’m doing it to save their life.
I’ve been called cold. Painful love is not cold. Painful love lies awake night after night contemplating a decision. Painful love endures with tolerance but ends a relationship when it becomes harmful. Painful love lives in truth.
My actions must be based on truth and my feelings must stem from truth. Where I struggle is to find healing in my fear and pain. How do I come to work after watching a child die, a man lose his wife, a woman see her husband lose his memory, a mother lose her unborn child, a teenager attempt suicide? Day after day after day?
How do I smile and promote patient satisfaction when I feel the pain of the people I cannot truly comfort?
Sometimes I do feel jaded, even dead inside. But do not assume that I do not feel something because my response is not what yours would be.
All of the earth is groaning. My heart and body are groaning. I am waiting eagerly for the glory that will far exceed the present suffering.
Romans 8: 18-39
