JEAN’S TIDBIT MAY 2021
This is National Nursing Week May 10 – 16, 2021 and the theme this year is:
#We Answer The Call.
This is your opportunity to express your gratitude to the nurse or nurses you know for all that they do. Send a note or make a call expressing your thanks, flowers, chocolates, a meal, a gift card, – you choose! Showing our support means so much!
National Nursing Week is a time to acknowledge the great care we receive from trained professionals who don’t just ‘do their job’, which in itself deserves recognition, but also ‘go beyond’, in caring for their charges.
This special week coincides with Florence Nightingale’s birthday. Florence Nightingale is honoured because she revolutionized modern nursing. Her family was horrified when Florence started helping people as they thought she should live life as a gentlewoman. Though she did not think herself deeply religious and never thought she became so, on February 7, 1837, when she was scarcely 17 years old, she felt that God spoke to her, calling her to future “service.” From that time on her life was changed.
No one else can be Florence Nightingale. Not everyone will become trained medical people. Yet, I believe God does ‘call’ all of us to service. The Apostle Paul says, So then, while we have opportunity, let us do good to all men, and especially to those who are of the household of the faith. Even the Old Testament says ‘You shall open wide your hand to your brother, to the needy and to the poor, in your land.’ I am reminded today of St. Francis of Assisi’s famous prayer:
Lord make Me an instrument of Your peace
Where there is hatred let me sow love.
Where there is injury, pardon.
Where there is doubt, faith.
Where there is despair, hope.
Where there is darkness, light.
Where there is sadness joy.
O Divine master grant that I may
Not so much seek to be consoled as to console
To be understood, as to understand.
To be loved. as to love
For it’s in giving that we receive
And it’s in pardoning that we are pardoned
And it’s in dying that we are born…
To eternal life
May God show you how you can be an ‘instrument of His peace’, and may we not ‘grow weary with well doing’.
Jean MacDonald, Parish Nurse