Proverbs 1: Fear of the Hospital, Fear of the Lord

"The fear of the LORD is the beginning of knowledge; fools despise wisdom and instruction" (Proverbs 1)

CPE starts on Monday, and I definitely have fear though I doubt this is the true awe for God that a minister ought to have in apprehension of walking into hospital ministry.  Right now, I'm most afraid of being awkward, and of seeming too young.  And I'm afraid of being a bad chaplain and making people feel worse rather than better.

In a way, there is a strange kind of freedom in accepting that it'll go very rough without any guarantee of it getting better.  Most of my life, I've gone into new challenges with a rigid determination to push through to success in whatever I was about to tackle, confident that if only I worked or studied hard enough then I would do well.  I even got through a horrendous semester of calculus in college that way, going to office hours every week and working problems deep into the night until I got my A.  The equation: Effort + (Studying x Hours Not Slept) = Success.  But chaplaincy isn't a meritocracy, and it simply doesn't work that way... there's no way to be type-A enough to force someone to reflect and share deeply with you in the midst of their grief or confusion - for, obviously, to force it would be cruddy ministry anyways.

So I'm just waiting for my program to start, and there's nothing I can study or do to prepare for the hype and pressure of the emergency room.  I'm just trying to make sure I'm as stable as possible - eating well, sleeping regularly, reading my Bible, emotionally capable of taking things in stride.  Right now, it feels very mundane and kind of boring, not glorious at all, but all I can do is hope this is the foundation and beginning of knowledge.  What knowledge? I'm not entirely sure, since there's nothing one is supposed to accomplish or do, no problem to fix.  Even on my good days, I'm inevitably going to be sitting there feeling awkward when I don't know what to say to a grieving parent, or can't understand what an intubated patient is wanting to say to me.

That's where God is really going to have to come through for us.  There is only so much from book knowledge and work ethic that one can rally usefully in a hospital room conversation.  I need God to help me be real, to perceive what people are really trying to say, and to truly learn when I bungle it up.