Journal of Sacred Work

The most demanding part of living a lifetime as an artist is the strict discipline of forcing oneself to work along the nerve of one's own most intimate sensitivity. -Anne Truitt, sculptor (quote supplied by Liz Wessel, R.N.)

   Dr. Elizabeth Krueger is one of this world's quiet angels. She works in an area of medicine that is so challenging people often shake their heads when she tells them her specialty. "I could never do that," they tell her.

   Dr. Krueger is a neonatologist. A high percentage of her patients are among the tiniest people on earth. All of them are in critical condition. She and her collegues are routinely asked to guide these fragile beings, some weighing less than a pound, along the dangerous pathway to health and stability.

   On most days, this exceptional doctor deals with a second group of patients. They are the parents of critically ill babies who look to her for help, for healing, and sometimes for magic.

   Dr. Krueger is living "along the nerve" of her "most intimate sensitivity" as surely as is any artist, sculptor or poet. It requires not only "strict discipline" but impressive courage for her to perform at her peak across the twenty-four hour shifts she works. When she can, she catches rest in a room down the hall from the unit when her patients wait. But, how do you rest when you know that at any moment the phone will ring? The calls are rarely good news.

   "Sometimes I feel like kicking a hole in the wall," she shared with me once. She has plenty of reasons to. Even with today's medicine, many premature babies are born with permanent problems.

   Instead of "kicking a hole in the wall," Dr. Krueger chooses to open her heart as well as her skilled hands. Across nearly a quarter century of working "along the nerve" of her deepest sensitivity, she has had plenty of moments of exhaustion and frustration. She always overcomes.

   I attended Divinity School with Dr. Krueger. She was a top student in that setting just as she had been in medical school. Her hard work and extra education are part of the tough training she has pursued so that she can apply her best potential to solving critically important, life-and-death problems.   

   Elizabeth is one half of a remarkable couple. Her husband, T.C., is a surgeon who has worked extensively and heroically with the Nobel Peace Prize winning program Doctors Without Borders. He was featured recently in the spectacular documentary "Living in Emergency." If you want to see more angels in actions, be sure and see this film. Amazingly, T.C. also graduated from Vanderbilt Divinity School like his wife. Perhaps Divinity school has helped both of them go even deeper in engaging God's Love in their work.

   Whatever the case, the Drs. Krueger are among the quiet angels of medicine. They extend their magic touch in the center of the day and in the middle of the night; in Nashville and in distant lands. And In every case, they offer healing as well as curing in a very special ministry of Love.

-Erie Chapman