BEACH BADGE

CAREFUL, PLEASE or HELP WANTED

"You shall no longer be called forsaken…"

Isaiah 62:4

Would you call Holland a caring community? There are people today working all over our town. They bathe and bathroom and dress and feed our grandparents and great uncles and aunts who are too weak or disoriented to do this for themselves. And most of them have to do it in a great big hurry.

"Thank God they're here" we might say to ourselves, passing by one of our neighborhoods facilities, perhaps noticing again the help wanted signs, wondering if we might ever find ourselves living there someday should our own families be unable to care for us.

No, most folks if they are honest would say it's no one's first choice. Still, our area nursing homes and assisted living centers make possible a certain quality of living for thousands in our community.

Or do they?

Meet Grace: A woman in her early 30's whose found her calling and has cared for many elderly individuals, most of whom were disabled to the point of needing consistent daily care. To an interview last winter she brought experience from group homes in the greater Grand Rapids area in hopes of better pay and benefits for a kind of work she realized could be challenging but also very rewarding. A care facility here in Holland promised a fairly competitive hourly rate ($18 per hour, with prior experience,) insurance and a benefits package (including 401(k).) It also painted the vision of a work environment that reflected the values of equity and fairness among staff members and a conscientious scrutiny of quality care through shared accountability.

"Given what I'd had before I was actually drawn to the pay and benefits," she mentioned in our recent interview. "But I also thought I'd get to know some of my patients, learn their names and needs. It's the relationships that you can build that makes this challenging work worth doing. Caring for people takes time."

Instead, from day one, she witnessed the cacophony of "buzzing call-lights" she was responsible to answer, behind each one an individual in need of restroom care or, in some of the worst instances, someone who'd fallen or become injured in an attempt to care for themselves after a "too - long" wait for assistance. "I worked there only three weeks and they were critically shortstaffed the entire time," she said. The worst of it, she went on to narrate, was an evening when yet another of her counterparts had called in sick (a routine from the outset) leaving her to scramble between as many as 48 patients over a 12 hour period without any support. "It was horrible" she said.

Still, it was the callousness and apathy of some of her counterparts on staff that was the hardest to swallow. The individuals she worked with were gruff and impolite, seemingly disconnected from who they were handling and "why they were there in the first place." On some occasions older attendants would even discourage Alzheimer’s patients from taking necessary showers which were otherwise mandated unless a resident requested a pass. Grace's manager, after hearing her complaints, offered her a shift or two at a "lighter-care" building, but that soon ended. Despite feeling much empathy for her sometimes overwhelmed manager, here again, it was the complacency and sense of fatalism that led Grace to move on to other employment.

She left with feelings of abandonment and profound guilt. To this day she drives to work another way so she doesn't have to be reminded of what happened there that night and what still might be going on.

Without too much effort most of us can imagine what it would feel like as an older person, the disabilities accruing with demands for a slower pace to accommodate aches and pains that naturally attend each of our bodies in late life. With paperthin skin of our own, we can see ourselves being rushed through the bathroom, led impatiently by the arm or forced out of bed to handle what are often called "dailies" with only as much as 15 minutes to shower and groom and dress.

On the other hand, many who offer care for loved ones of their own can empathize with overloaded care attendants. Communicating with people who have dementia or Alzheimer's can make it difficult to form bonds of mutual trust and understanding. Perhaps many could see how easy it would be to begin by first fearing we might hurt someone, only to watch that more compassionate response slowly diminish to a more a-pathic posture where bumps and scrapes and frightening long waits just "come with the territory."

So what should WE do? If we are a caring community, how does that take shape? What does it look like? We hear terrible stories like this from time to time, don't we? What does that alone suggest about our culture and our priorities?

Should we recommend that families keep a closer eye on grandpa and hold managers more accountable? Yes. Should we suggest a call to the ombudsman or other local officials who govern and police underfunctioning facilities? Yes. Should we thank and encourage hospitals nearby for their continued efforts to make sure the worst cases are investigated? Yes, indeed.

Either way, it seems important to stop and listen to stories like these. Let them affect us, even trouble our hearts. Just a few years ago many remember Holland being touted as one of the happiest cities in the country, and goodness gracious how many churches do these people need? Caring for the vulnerable and the elderly has been a challenge for human beings as long as there have been human beings. Many of the religious in our town, of which I am but one, could tell you how serious the prophets and Jesus were about remembering them in all their frailty and forgottenness.

In fact, during his time he was no fundraiser encouraging the building up of bigger churches and seminaries. Jesus washed their feet. It's good work.

At the close of the first month of a brand-new year, are there new partnerships that could be explored? What efforts already exist among churches and community organizations whose voices could further be amplified? Could area colleges and vocational training agencies be further supported as they promote viable opportunities for qualified young people thus meeting the basic needs of our cherished elders and friends? After all, do we not belong to God and also to each other?

Rev. Randy Smit is a pastor, writer and founder of Compassionate Connection, a ministry of Hope Church, RCA. https://www.facebook.com/Compassionate-Connection-Ministry-505409932889624/. He and his wife Jill live in Holland.

DEAR ONE

merrily, merrily

merrily, merrily

I cannot believe how utterly blessed I am… To have you as a friend… To have you witness my life so beautifully just the way you do, like no one else can, truly…

I can have dreams of horses all throughout the day and night and I can show them to you and we can ride them side-by-side down every rocky avenue we wish and quietly beside every stream… Hear the waters trickling… I want to go everywhere and I am taking you with me. I’m taking you all with me…

Of course, you and you… And most certainly you, dork. How could I not?

Can I ask you something – When I remember you and I feel connected to you can you feel it also? Do you ever have a twinge of something that feels warm and thankful at once, that can squirm straight up the corner of your mouth or wriggle all twirly out from your belly somehow in a way that surprises but leaves you shamelessly pleased, surely agiggle?

Yes, blessed indeed.

I can even see the future. There, I said it.

And so can you, we are utterly blessed, so can you.

Children are laughing all over the place in every shape and color and size and with hopes… Real ones. That's the future, man.

The whole world is held together by this one glue; the laughter of children, the stuff of their dreams in which they each have meaningful day jobs in the world doing something heroic and playful all at once, mapping out new worlds for themselves day by day with the only challenge before them to find ever newly inspiring and creative ways to express love and joy and peace and kindness and self-mastery and patience; and to find more and more enjoyable ways to blossom and further the abundance, the essence of which is Love, such that cannot ever be thought or spoken but must be sung, must be giggled out by those whose hearts trust the flight of ever and again being swept away into something more dazzling and enduring than they'd yet conceived of.

I simply cannot believe it, how blessed indeed.

PROPHESY!

Here is why sometimes suddenly the sadness
will just overwhelm me... here is the reason...

I let it all come to me, I let it fall straight down
sharply into my spirit and my body, I let it pierce
me, I let it hurt me terribly and make me vomit...
my sons and daughters are dying in madness
darker than any had dreamt possible... randomness
of terrors and the earth burns and floods and
promises an end so painfully soon of how the
earth feels to us... the extremities will not
relent... watch the winds... watch the people's...

CRY OUT!!  Cry and grown and yearn...

Go where it points you, Trust what you find,

Achieve what it promises or soon

FIRESIDE CHAT: Satisfaction Begets Satisfaction

4.  Satisfaction begets Satisfaction


Gratitude is satedness, contentment or the felt sense of a satisfied fullness.  Wanting what we have, blessing by blessing, we fully enjoy each gift.  Contentment is a posture of ongoing satisfaction which is carried as ease and peacefulness without pestering among choices or sorting through endless preferences.

Instead of wondering if we are comfortable enough or satisfied enough as though in a cycle of perpetual wanting, we intend with a loving energy, from the inside out, to gaze upon the beauty of nature, to pray over a loved one with a smile, to bless with a nod each bird, touch with our eyes each twig.

Satisfaction with what is can be the next choice you make.  Where you take it is up to you.  Thanksgiving is an exercise in the full enjoyment of God's bounty of which we, from butterfly to bingo night, may happily partake.

FIRESIDE CHAT: World Care

FIRESIDE CHAT


3.  Attentive to World Care

The world project is well underway and those of us who live now to speak of it witness yet another of humanities episodic movements toward contraction and isolation, vengeance, violence and fear mongering between people groups, oddly among those who would refer to themselves as more civilized or "blessed."

The world's wealth and power not only remains disproportionately located but highly consolidated among leaders who benefit directly from oligarchic national control and who also vivify the same opportunistic pattern among others like themselves, thus putting the globe at risk of being ruled by the wealthiest few for their own benefit and with an eye toward collaborating to secure such control with the promise of longevity.

It is incumbent upon us to stay alert, therefore, and to remain vigilant in our discourse; that which happens on social media, among the faculties and students of our universities, the scholars and pastors, the artists and poets.  It's an important time to remember the power of speech, the shaping and mis-shaping capacity of language.  It's an important time to remember the power of paying attention to one another carefully by listening to our family members from all around the world with great care, focus and a willingness to see ourselves through their own faces of concern and intention.

Humanity is not a given.  Humanity is the fragile blossom of a well tended, living and fragile planet filled with vulnerable persons who need each other.  It shows up while we are humane, when we enact the peace and empathy and harmony we long for.

The Freedom of Thanksgiving

FIRESIDE CHAT

2.  The Freedom of Thanksgiving



The greatest liberating power on earth is gratitude.  Present to one's own life, practicing the intentional naming of daily blessings causes one to see again, in its immediacy, the life-giving power of the bread, the cup; the in-breath, the out-breath.

Paying attention to what we consume and the comforts of our daily rhythms can constitute a sort of unending mindfulness which has little space for comparison or envy which can so quickly captivate us.

Set free from unawareness and an indifference to the gifted and multilayered nature extant amidst the wondrous complexities of the world surrounding us, we at last know how to receive properly and also how to share.  Remembering this leaves me wanting to give as I have received.