Utilizing Your Faith Community Nurse Training

Featured Article, June 2023

Are you like me?  Do you ever look at all the materials from your FCN course and feel a bit overwhelmed, wondering how you’ll ever be able to put all that information to good, practical use?  Have you sometimes looked at your nursing practice and felt even more intimidated as you recognize the true effectiveness of your ministry is directly related to your own spiritual health?

Reading slowly (again) through the book “Steps to Christ” by Ellen G. White illuminated a template that is proving very helpful to me.  This gem is found at the top of page 70:

“Consecrate yourself to God in the morning; make this your very first work.  Let your prayer be, “Take me, O Lord, as wholly Yours.  I lay all my plans at your feet.  Use me today in Your service.  Abide with me and let all my work be wrought in You.”  This is a daily matter.  Each morning consecrate yourself to God for that day.  Surrender all your plans to Him, to be carried out or given up as His providence shall indicate.  Thus, day by day you may be giving your life into the hands of God, and thus your life will be molded more and more after the life of Christ.”

First, I memorized the following sentences:

1. Lord, take me as wholly Yours.
2. I lay all my plans at Your feet.
3. Use me today in Your service.
4. Abide with me and let all my work be wrought* in You.

Then, every morning before offering usual AM prayers, or before engaging in any devotional study, or even before getting out of my warm bed, I thoughtfully pray these four sentences.  Maybe some mornings I’ll dwell on one sentence a little more than the other, but always finding relief and comfort in the expression of each thought, each morning.

Truth:  We cannot possibly remember and incorporate all the information from our FCN classes!

Nor can we ever, on our own, even hope to be effective spiritual caregivers!

But.

Jesus was and remains the ultimate Faith Community Nurse!  And if we give ourselves completely to Him, and we lay all our best plans at His feet, and He is able to use us in His service, and He is abiding in us, and He is practicing through us… can you think of any other better way for our nursing practices to flourish and our spiritual caregiving to be successful?

I can’t!  😊

Perhaps this thought from page 83 is speaking directly to us nurses?  I’ve modified the pronouns for effect. (Click here to read the passage unaltered.)  ‘We are not required to weary ourselves with anxiety about success.  We have only to go forward quietly, doing faithfully the work that God’s providence assigns, and our life will not be in vain.  Our own souls will be growing more and more into the likeness of Christ; we are workers together with God in this life and are thus fitting for the higher work and the shadowed joy of the life to come.’

*Made, shaped, molded, fashioned, processed, worked