Healthcare leaders often reflect on what is best for the organization they head. Supervisors evaluate ways to motivate their team. Large organizations review, revise, rethink and constantly restate their vision and mission statements.
What matters most is not group or team decisions. It is your individual choice as a caregiver that counts.
Organizations don't actually make decisions. Neither do teams. It's the individual call that counts.
When an organization of one thousand announces a plan, the plan will go nowhere unless the organization's employees choose to follow. The same is true of a team of one hundred, or ten, or two.
This truth is often overlooked as organizations, countries and entire religions seek direction. They imagine that grand orders will generate compliance from hearts as well as heads.
This is the problem with advancing both loving care and, for that matter, Christianity. The mouth says yes. The heart says no.
We are called to love our enemies. Instead, we hate them. We are called to love the poor. We find ourselves looking down on them. We commit to caring for people regardless of how they look and discover they we are looking at the overweight and the drug addicted with judgment and quiet derision.
The only thing that will awaken Loving behavior is Loving thoughts. It's the hardest thing about Love and it's also the most important.
Living Love requires not just one personal decision but thousands across every day. This is why rituals of prayer followed by practice followed by reflection need to travel through us in a lifelong circle.
It's too bad we'll never be able to do it exactly as we hope. But, what is worse is if we turn away from the challenge to live Love and instead default to a life of bitterness and mediocrity. By choosing to live Love, we have already begun to do so.
-Erie Chapman
Journal of Sacred Work 
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