Journal entry, June 14,
2000
Meditation: "How
you spend your days is how you spend your life"
How do we make room for
spirit in our patients and in ourselves? Whether we call it faith, or
instilling hope, or there is much in healing that is beyond logic, beyond
our medications, beyond our procedures not instead of these things but
aligned with them.
What is it that the patient
and the family bring to the table? What do we, by the gift of ourselves,
bring? It is not only our knowledge and our experience as a physician,
not even just our compassion The gift we also bring is in being there,
present and whole: mind, body, and spirit, walking with the patient.
"Being present"
is too easy to forget in the ordinariness of one more patient in one
more long day and in the forgetting, and in the fatigue, we sometimes
settle for the mechanical then we lose our own meaning the source of
our own joy.
As people, it is the "ordinary"
in our days that soothes and heals each one of us. When we experience
a loved one in danger, it becomes so clear in that moment what is important
The background noise fades and we pray for just an "ordinary day."
"From the hands of
God to our hands " I don't remember where those words come from,
but I know as a physician that is what we are given in our daily work
By Kitty
Evers, MD
