You have come to the end of a long and*arduous course of study. You have filled your minds with innumerable facts and figures. And if you are like unto us who have attended school before you, you have sought to remember enough important facts to pass successfully the final examinations. That is both understandable and sensible. You will quickly discover that there are some things you can forget without harm to your professional skill, but there are some facts and techniques you must ever remember and apply.
However, I am not concerned with the medical facts you should remember, but rather with more important spiritual truths. You have been tutored in an institution that is an integral part of a religious movement. You have studied the Bible as well as materia medica. You have been taught ideals as well as isolation techniques. There are some principles in the realm of religion and ideals that I would have you remember at all costs.
I. Higher Training creates Greater Responsibility.—You have been trained, not for a job, but for a profession, the profession of nursing. To every honorable profession there belongs a code. And nursing is no exception. That code you must never forget. To acquire the skill and the financial possibilities that professional training gives, without accepting its ethical code, is like acquiring a high-speed car but refusing to use its brakes and its steering gear. Your specialized training simply places on you a greater responsibility to order your life conformably to high ideals. If those who have had the opportunities of better tutoring of the mind fail to make a genuine contribution to the good side of earth's ledger, what justification can they offer for their much-vaunted higher learning? You belong to the ranks of the educated. Act like educated people in the best sense of the word. There is Florence Nightingale's lamp that must be kept lighted. The oil you pour in to maintain the flame must be the oil of your devotion to the high ideals of the nursing profession.
2. Inject Christian Touch Into Professional Skill.—But it is not sufficient that you should remember you are nurses. You must ever remember that you are Christian nurses. It is this combining of your profession with the Christian religion that gives to nursing its richer possibilities. As Christian nurses you see yourselves ministering, not to biological entities, not to co-ordinated masses of protoplasm, but to beings made in the image of God. You are ministering to the descendants of Adam, whom the Scriptures describe as a son of God. That is what gives a true sense of sacredness and dignity to your profession.
The qualities of mercy and compassion—indispensable in a truly successful nurse—are raised to their highest point in the Christian nurse. You are following in the steps of Him who had compassion on the multitudes and who mercifully ministered to the sick. If the love of God is in your heart, it will come out at your finger tips as you bathe a fevered brow. And if the voice of God is sounding in your soul, it will echo out in the tones of your voice as you seek to bring restful sleep to a troubled sufferer.
3. Mind, Body, and Soul Interlocked.—However, I would have you further remember that you are not Christian nurses in a vague sense of the word. The term Christian is often loosely used. You are Seventh-day Adventist Christian nurses. That means you hold a very distinctive idea of the nature of these beings whom you are called upon to nurse. You view man, not as a soul temporarily encased in a relatively worthless shell, the body. Instead, you view him as one closely integrated entity—body, mind, and spirit all inextricably fused as parts of one whole. This view of man is not only good Seventh-day Adventist theology but also good medical science. There is a very respectable and significant branch of medicine called psychosomatic medicine that deals with the problem of man's maladies on the premise that mind and spirit and body are all interlocked, that man is really one and indivisible.
In your Bible classes you studied the doctrine of the nature of man, and thought of it as rather a strictly theological matter. Indeed, you probably viewed this doctrine as significant only because it gave you the facts regarding the state of the dead. I would have you remember that this doctrine provides most valuable information as to the state of the living. And it is to the living you minister.
According to our view of man's nature you can never permit yourself to think that you are simply caring for a stomach ulcer called Mrs. Jones or a hypertension called Mr. Smith. Instead, you will always see yourself caring for a sensitively integrated organism, a personality, whose every part interacts on every other part. And that will unconsciously affect all your ministrations to the sick.
The most frequent and also the most flattering comment that patients offer on our sanitariums is that the atmosphere is so different from that of the average hospital. By this they do not mean that perfumed prescriptions are used, or that scented sprays are given in hydrotherapy. They mean instead, if they are able to phrase their feelings in words, that the manner and attitude of those who minister are, in some mysterious way, a little different from the ordinary, that there is a sweet incense in the personality of those who wait upon them.
I think the difference is an unconscious reflection on the fact that our Adventist belief as to the nature of man leads us to view each patient, not as a collection of organs, one or more of which we are treating, but as a living, pulsating being_ And according to this view you deal not simply with Mrs. Jones' stomach ulcer but also with Mrs. Jones, who has the ulcer. You do not confine your ministry simply to Mr. Smith's hypertension, you minister also to Mr. Smith, who has the hypertension. And that change of emphasis makes a vast difference in the kind of service you give.
Now, a stomach ulcer may be due to a bad diet or to a bad conscience or a combination of both. And hypertension may find its etiology in a nephritic pathology or in a tension of the spirit. There is a pathology of the mind and spirit as well as of the body. And what begins as a malady of mind or spirit may metastasize until it affects remote bodily organs. The stomach ulcer and hypertension can provide classic illustrations of this.
4. Physical Maladies a by-product of Sin. -It is in the setting of these facts that I wish you to remember that in dealing with physical maladies you are dealing with a by-product of sin. There was originally a mortal malady of the mind and soul that fastened upon our great father Adam. That malady slowly metastasized until it spelled death for the body as well as the mind and soul of Adam. When God declared to him that if he disobeyed he would die, the Lord was making no arbitrary statement; He was announcing a sinister fact of cause and effect.
The body cannot be in health if the mind and spirit are ill. And when man, who was made to live in fellowship with God, severed that bond, an inevitable and fatal sickness of mind and spirit ensued. When men are alienated from the life of God, as all sinful men are through evil works, the divine stimulus to living is gone, for it is in God that we live and move and have our being. The wages of sin is death—death first of all to the spiritual nature of man, death to the ideals and standards that should govern beings made in the image of God. And finally it is visible death to the physical man, for the physical is inseparably fused with the spiritual.
He that soweth to the flesh shall of the flesh reap corruption. Dissipation is only a way station on the road to dissolution. The apostle Paul, in his inspired recital of the shocking depravity into which mankind sank after Adam's fall, gives the sequence we are here setting forth. Men turned from God in mind and spirit and from that to debasing physical practices, which practices brought their own "recompense" of judgment on outraged bodies, as the Scriptures declare.
That is the extreme illustration, the most startling exhibit of the relation between sin and bodily ills. But the principle applies to all the children of Adam. All the physical maladies of man find their original etiology in the infection of the spirit that took place in Eden. The truth of this becomes obvious when the question is raised: Would mankind ever have been plagued with sickness and death if sin had not entered?
5. Softening the Tragedy of Sin and Death. —I would have you remember, therefore, that in seeking to heal the maladies of mankind you are striving to soften the tragedy of sin. You are in league with God and the angels. Our Lord sought to heal men's maladies. Of Him it is written that He went about doing good and healing all that were oppressed.
But if you confine yourself to treating visible maladies, if you think of your nursing ministry only in terms of the physical, you continually treat only end results. That is like treating boils without treating the systemic condition that produces the boils. Most certainly when you minister to physical maladies you are in league with God and the angels, but such an alliance is on a rather earthy level.
When Christ healed a man, He solemnly gave him this spiritual prescription: "Sin no more, lest a worse thing come unto thee." Our Lord was not content to deal exclusively with end results. His whole public ministry strikingly shows how He regarded sickness. He saw it in the setting of a world tragedy of sin. He followed His healing of a blind young man with the declaration, "I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly." And to the Jews, who suffered most acutely from that primal malady of the spirit, rebellion against God, He sorrowfully said, "Ye will not come to Me, that ye might have life." The life of which Christ spoke was both physical and spiritual. He offered men life if they would walk in the ways of godliness. And inspiration assures us that godliness is profitable unto all things, having promise of the life that now is as well as of that which is to come.
You, as nurses, watch the actual process of disintegration that is at work in our sinful bodies. You witness the slow, and sometimes not so slow, execution of the awful edict, "Dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return." All pathologies produce necrosis, death to at least a limited area of the body. Even in the small area of cell destruction that a pathological state may produce, there is found in miniature the tragedy of decay and dissolution that has haunted the steps of all men*since Adam, and has finally overtaken all, save Enoch and Elijah.
So far as your strictly .medical tutoring is concerned, you have been trained simply to help men gain a stay of the execution of death. But are you content with this ? Are you content merely to add length to men's lives, without adding height and depth and breadth to those lives?
6. Grappling Successfully with Suffering. —That question brings us to the very heart of the matter of your life's objectives and leads me to call upon you to remember that your goal as Adventist Christian nurses must be to build your league with – God and the angels on the heavenly level. We must learn to minister not only to men's and women's bodies but also to their minds and spirits, bringing them again into contact with the life of God. Thus only can we hope to grapple successfully with the tragedy of human suffering and woe. It was with this goal in view that our medical work was founded. And only as this goal is kept in view can our medical work hope to accomplish its mission as an integral part of a religious movement.
God did not call upon this advent movement to do so unusual a thing as to build medical institutions as well as churches, and to train doctors and nurses as well as ministers and Bible instructors, just because He desired these doctors and nurses to care only for the bodies of men. Such care can be given in numerous hospitals in the land, and in some instances better care may be possible because of huge endowments and special equipment. But God called upon us to foster medical work because, rightly carried on, it can play a part in the divine plan for the salvation of men. The medical and ministerial are not two separate and distinct lines of activity. They are parts of one whole, and the link that connects them and provides the full justification for a medical side to this religious movement, is the fact that all physical woes and maladies are a by-product of our sinful state. The kind of service you render to the cause of God and to suffering humanity will help to reveal whether the goal of Adventist medical work is being maintained.
7. Nursing Ministry A Sacred Opportunity. —Remember that you, above all others in the advent movement, have access to the minds and spirits of men and women. You care for them in the hours of illness, when they seek, more than all else, a strengthening word. You minister to them when they lie in quietness, -thinking long thoughts away from life's hurrying duties. You minister to them in the night seasons, when the mantle of darkness shuts out all the fearsome phantoms of their troubled minds. Here are opportunities, unparalleled, for service. Will it be written in the indelible ledger above that you administered only food from the diet kitchen when you might also have dispensed fruit from the tree of life? Or that you gave to drink only water from the fountain, when you might also have offered water from the river of life?
Remember that the last face and voice impressed on the consciousness of many who go down into the valley of shadows is that of their nurse, and the next to burst upon them is the voice and the face of their God. Whether they meet God in peace may depend on whether you planted the peace of God in their hearts before they slipped from your hands.
I charge you solemnly to view each patient, not as a case number, but as a sacred opportunity. Remember that while you may have no power to lift up his physical frame to health, you may be able to lift up his mind and spirit to communion with Him who is the resurrection and the life.
