This year I will be working as a chaplaincy intern at Duke hospital. Each week, I am writing a personal reflection on an encounter related to my chaplaincy work.

When I visiting home last Friday, I met with my chaplaincy mentor, Joannah, who I worked with years ago at a local community hospital. We were talking about my upcoming CPE internship. I told her that I had been assigned to the pediatric unit, and while she was giving me advice for the year, she started tearing up. I asked why, and she said she was just thinking of the children and families she worked with when she was a pediatric chaplain at Emory. She said, “You’re going to have your heart broken.”  I’m feel eager to be in the chaplain role again, but I found that seeing Joannah like that gave me a sense of doubt. During the past two years of school, I have felt quite uprooted from my spiritual life and community I left behind to come here. I haven’t been tending to that part of my life as deeply as I have in the past, mostly because of the emotional, physical and mental demands of medical school. And it’s partly because of that disconnect that I am so determined to be doing this work this year—to experience the spiritual nourishment and deepening that will come from being present to others through suffering. However, at the same time, I worry how the stress and disconnect of the past two years has made me feel uniquely less prepared for this work than I have felt in other seasons of my life. 

After some reflection this past week, I’ve decided that I think it is good that I am somewhat wary in the midst of my eagerness. My wariness is pointing to something important, which is my yearning to feel spiritually grounded enough to do the work of chaplaincy. It’s telling me not to forget that this is going to require that I do the work of nourishing myself alongside the work of nourishing others.