Come to Me With Your Whole Heart

My decision to stay off social media began with a half-hearted effort for lent, it has been my go-to for a few years now because I know that it is a serious distraction in my spiritual life. I can easily spend an hour scrolling through the different mediums, yet struggle to have 20 min of silent prayer. This year was no different, or at least I thought. At the beginning of the outbreak, like many other fellow nurses and skeptical American citizens, I received a lot of the information about the novel corona virus from the media with a grain of salt. It felt so distant, until it wasn’t. Friends began to cancel plans, my fun loving, relaxed co-workers started to sound more worried. The parishes I liked to attend began to cancel masses. The day it hit me was when my brother messaged our family group chat letting us know that the government of Spain had put the town where he has been living and working on his graduate degree under isolation orders. Suddenly, I was being pulled from patient care to screen hospital visitors as the came on through the front door. It seemed that everyday brought new overwhelming information and policies at work and in my daily life. It has been over a month, and that has not changed. It feels as though, the only constant today is change.

But that is not completely true, amidst of all the changes in my life, there has been one unchanging fact and that is the love of God for me. As the shock started to wear off, I could hear that still small voice again, the Lord showing me that He is still here, waiting for me to turn to Him, to come to Him with my whole heart. And to do that I had to make a conscious effort to consume as little media as possible, while staying informed, I chose to silence all the noise of fear and choose peace.  Every day I make the decision to make Christ the center of my life and not this pandemic take over.

For the first time, I have no excuse to not make it to daily mass on my days off from work. And it is with joy that I join some of my brothers and sisters in daily Skype praise. Even having an hour of adoration on the ESM Manilla Facebook page!

Through all these gifts, the Lord strengthens me to do the work of His hands when I care for precious little lives in the Neonatal ICU. I am more grateful than ever for the vocation God has given me to be a nurse. I can pray for the mothers and fathers I encounter at work, who are bringing new life into a strange world. I can support my fellow nurses in the frontline, including my brave mother, by lifting them up in daily prayer.

Every day, I choose to answer God and go to Him with my whole heart, praising Him, giving Him all my worries and cares; and He never fails to pour Himself completely in return.

Nancy (CA)