First off, I just want to thank everybody for their well-wishing and prayers, that goes for folks who have done CPE and for those who haven’t. It is a rough program at times.

As I’ve told lots of you, part of the program is doing overnight on-call shifts at the hospital. This means I get to stay at the hospital all night, making myself available for pages and traumas in the ER. A lot of the time, the night is quiet (n.b., we never say the q-word; it’s bad luck!), but other nights it’s not. Last night was a hard one.

Ordinarily, baptizing babies is an event of intense and deep spiritual joy. As a chaplain, though, it’s often very much not such an event. The only baptisms we really get to do is for babies who aren’t going to make it. Last night, I was paged twice to the world of babies and new mothers to do a baptism. I won’t get into the details here in this ever-so-public forum, but you can rest assured that intense and spiritual joy was not the primary emotion in operation. If you want to know more, let me know; I’d love to work through it some more…

On the hospital shows, like Scubs and House, eventually there’s an episode about how everpresent death is in a hospital. This week was apaprently my episode. It’s not that I ever really thought anything like “what’s the point?” or “why would God do this?” but there’s definitely a lot to deal with… We learn different ways to deal with it. The night after I stood with a man while his wife died, I came home and listened to Sufjan Stevens’ version of Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing. Today, I went to the museum, then saw Wall•E. That was good therapy. Everyone shoul dgo see that movie. It is absolutely amazing. One of the best movies I’ve seen in a long time.

Thanks again to everyone who takes a gander at this little w’blog! Don’t be shy, if you feel moved, leave me a comment or twelve! I’d love to hear from you!