Nursing has a way of challenging – and sometimes flat out messing with – your perspective on life. So many Sundays, I’ve gone to church and started singing about truths I know to be foundational – God is good, mercy and hope are real, comfort is near. I have seen and experienced all of these things in my own times of trial. And still, the inner stretch, the wrestling from all I witness at work, it goes on. I feel it most profoundly when I am standing in the pews, seeking to reconcile this stretch with the truths my lips are proclaiming.
My latest guest post for the American Journal of Nursing describes this inner stretch in the heart of a nurse: