Journal of Sacred Work

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"Happiness and vanity are incompatable." – line from the film, Dangerous Liasons

  Special thanks to each of you who sent congratulations to Liz and to me on the fifth anniversary of the Journal. We received more comments than we have ever had on a single post. 

   We hope you will stay with us and continue to tell others about the Journal – perhaps through your facebook account in which you could list the journal link: http://www.journalofsacredwork.typepad.com.

   We want the Journal to be as widely read as possible so that other caregivers can receive the same benefits you have been drawing. 

   And there are other kinds of "thank yous" each of us can celebrate this very day. After posting a sixty year old photo of myself in a baseball uniform on our fifth anniversary essay I found myself in Boston next to my grandson – who is the same age in the picture, above, as I was in the black and white photo (at right.)

   What he thinks about at age seven, as I did back then, is about how well he's playing and whether he wins. For me today, as it will be for him someday, it has almost nothing to do with that. Instead it is the experience of being out there near him, cheering from the stands, watching his face as he gets a hit or tags out a runner.

   As you move through your career as a caregiver, I hope you will increasingly savor those "in-between" moments with your colleagues and patients. Not just the times you are giving medications or adjust naso-gastric tubes or offering a drink of water, but the times when you are standing there at the nurse's station enjoying the company of your co-workers or the families of a sick patient. And there are the special times when you are caregiving in a different way – looking after the needs of a family member of friend.

   As I look at myself sixty years ago and again at a photo of me with my grandson all these decades later, I can only feel gratitude for the chance I've had to be a caregiver for my son, daughter and grandchildren. 

   There are plenty of things to complain about in the hard world of caregiving. But "happiness and vanity are incompatable." Our complaining often comes from vanity – from our feeling that we have a right to more. Sometimes, that is true.

   How much wiser it is for us to follow a practice that is much more consistent with happiness – to make the choice, each day, to say a quiet "thank you" for God's Love. For we are blessed with the opportunity to live our most sacred calling – to be a caregiver.

-Reverend Erie Chapman