You may have heard of Mr. Wilberforce. He it was who, after a long life of unremitting activity, varied only with disappointment, carried the Abolition of the Slave Trade, one of England’s greatest titles to the gratitude of nations. Slavery, as Livingstone said, is the open sore of the world. (Mr. Clarkson and my grandfather were two of his fellow-workers.) Some one asked how Mr. Wilberforce did this, and a man I knew answered, “Because his life was hid with Christ in God.”
Never was there a truer word spoken. And if we, when the time comes for us to be in charge of Wards, are enabled to “abolish” anything wrong in them, it can only be in the same way, by our life being hid with Christ in God. And no man or woman will do great things for God, or even small, whose “hidden life” is employed in self-complacency, or in thinking over petty slights, or of what other people are thinking of her.
We have three judges—our God, our neighbour, and ourselves. Our own judgment of ourselves is, perhaps, generally too favourable: our neighbour’s judgment of us too unfavourable, except in the case of close friends, who may sometimes spoil each other. Shall we always remember to seek God’s judgment of us, knowing this, that it will some day find us, whether we seek it or not? He knows who is His nurse, and who is not.
This is laying the “foundation”; this is the “hidden life with Christ in God” for us Nurses. “Keeping up to the mark,” as St. Paul says; and nothing else will keep us up to the mark in Nursing.
“Neglect nothing; the most trivial action may be performed to ourselves, or performed to God.” What a pity that so many actions should be wasted by us Nurses in our Wards and in our “Home,” when we might always be doing common things uncommonly well!
Small things are of consequence—small things are of no consequence; we say this often to ourselves and to each other.
And both these sayings are true.
Every brick is of consequence, every dab of mortar, that it may be as good as possible in building up your house. A chain is no stronger than its weakest link: therefore every link is of consequence. And there can be no “small” thing in Nursing. How often we have seen a Nurse’s life wrecked, in its usefulness, by some apparently small fault! Perhaps this is to say that there can be no small things in the nursing service of God.
But in the service of ourselves, oh! how small the things are! Of no consequence indeed. How small they will appear to us all some day!
For what does it profit a Nurse if she gain the whole world to praise her, and lose her own soul in conceit? What does it profit if the judgment of the whole world is for us Nurses, and God’s is against us?