Ashing

Today, I spent the afternoon ashing people. I ashed doctors. I ashed patients. I ashed nurses. I ashed in patient rooms, hallways, in the chapel. I got ashed by another chaplain.

I'm guessing that most of you know what I'm talking about, and it's nothing evil or dirty. Today is Ash Wednesday. We had an Ash Wednesday service at Rush. After the service, all the chaplains got little containers of ashes to take to our units and other areas of the hospital to give ashes to whomever wanted them. I took mine up to my unit and also to Mike's unit because he was post-call today, so he had gone home early this morning. When I got back to the office, Karen asked if I would go back to the chapel and give out more ashes. She and Fern had been there, but about 5 minutes after they left, more people had come, wanting ashes. So I went and ashed some more people, including a child in a stroller.

I guess it's been a while since I've updated the blog. CPE is going along. Three weeks from tomorrow it is officially over. It is unofficially over three weeks from today. Our final day is "Play Day" where we get free food and get to go do something fun...thus, I don't count it as an actual CPE day ;)

I had my third on-call last Friday. The person who was supposed to do it was sick, so they needed someone to cover. Nick came up with the fantastic idea for me to see if I could do it. Then, I would have my time made up and would not have to come back after the unit was over. I had been scheduled on March 19, the Monday after the end of the unit, for on-call to make up the hours that I am in class at LSTC. I thought that was a good idea, so I asked and that's what I did. Everyone was very thankful, since I don't think anyone else wanted to take it. Turned out very well. The pager was very well behaved. I think I got less than 10 pages the entire 24 hours, some of them I was able to pass to other chaplains because they were there and the pages were for their units. I watched some TV and actually slept a decent amount of time. Not the best sleep, but it was sleep!

Classes here at LSTC are going ok. I like both of my in-class classes, Lutheran Confessional Heritage and Worship. I feel like I'm learning a lot. Online history is ok. Life and Letters of Paul....I think I could like the class more if I liked the professor. But at least I'm not in-class, so I only have to deal with him via email and online postings. :) I also feel like I am supposed to be utterly flabbergasted and surprised at what we're learning. And I'm not, really.

But anyway. That's it for now. Tomorrow I get to do Story Theology at CPE. I'm actually kind of looking forward to it.