God. We Still Need You.: A Year of Pandemic Prayer and Practice From a Hospital Chaplain (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9798714229305)

Sometimes we need prayers to help us reflect on the pain we've lived through.

In the euphoria of a vaccine and the freedom that people will feel, the work of those who lived through the worst will be forgotten. Tragically, the effects of that work will linger for the rest of the lives of those nurses. And respiratory therapists. And intensivists and patient care techs and EVS workers and child life specialists and radiologists and pharmacy techs. And chaplains.

• We will all carry with us the pictures of families on the other end of Zoom calls, watching mom as she is taking her last breaths.
  
• We will remember the fastidious, almost paranoid attention to donning and doffing protective gear.
  
• We will remember the IV poles in the hallways outside rooms with COVID-19 patients. Or we will forget those moments and be surprised when we suddenly start crying.
  
• We will all carry with us the tension in our bodies we felt as we read our social media feeds talking about a made-up virus as we think about its actual cost on the people we took care of inside the hospital.
  

Into this grief come the words of a hospital chaplain who worked through this year.

Starting with Advent 2019 and going through Thanksgiving 2020, these essays and prayers reflect one hospital chaplain's conversations with God and others during a challenging year. The framework is the church calendar: Advent, Epiphany, Lent, Eastertide, Ordinary Time.

Each section starts with orientation to the season, to what was happening outside the hospital, and what was happening inside. The heartbeat is the Sunday prayers. Essays from the author's blogs, 300wordsaday.com and SocialMediaChaplain.com, are placed into that framework at the time they were written.

The death and uncertainty aren't always in the foreground of these prayers and reflections. There are stories and moments that must be protected. But those stories and moments are always informing the writing. And this isn't a memoir, not in the kind that reviews the past and provides meaning. Instead, it is a journal, written in public, offering glimpses of a difficult year.