When a Patient, especially a Child, sees us acting as if there were no God, then there but too often becomes no God to him. Then words become to such a child mere words. And remember, that when such a Nurse—“salt” which has lost its “savour”—speaks to her Patients of God, she puts a hindrance in their way to keep them from God, instead of helping them to God. She had better not speak to them at all.
It is a terrible thought—I speak for myself—that we may prevent people from believing in God, instead of bringing them to “believe in God the Father Almighty.”
What is it, “setting an example”? An example—of what? Who is our example, that we are to set? Christ is our example, our pattern: this we all know and say. And when this was once said—a very common word—before a very uncommon man, he said: “When you have your picture taken, the painter does not try to make it rather like, or not very unlike. It is not a good picture if it is not exactly like.” Do we try to be exactly like Christ? If we do not, “are we His, or are we not?” Could it be said of each one of us: “That Nurse is (or is trying to be) exactly what Christ would have been in her place”?
Yet this is what every Nurse has to aim at. Aim lower: and you cannot say then, “Christ is my example.” Aim as high: and, after this life, “we shall be satisfied when we awake in His likeness.”
But this aim cannot be carried out, it cannot even be entertained, without the Parting Promise. The Parting Promise was fulfilled to the disciples ten days afterwards, on Whit-Sunday, when the Holy Spirit was given them—that is, when Christ came as He promised, and was with them.
Christ comes to each Nurse of us all: and stands at our little room-door and knocks. Do we let Him in?
The Holy Spirit comes, no more with outward show but with no less inward power, to each Ward and to each Nurse of us all, who is trying to do her Nursing and her Ward work in God, to live her hidden Nurse’s life with Christ in God.
When your Patient asks you for a drink, you do not give him a stone. And shall not our Heavenly Father much more give His Spirit to each one of us, His nurses, when she asks Him? (Are we His nurses?)
What is meant by the Spirit descending upon us Nurses, as it did on the first Whitsuntide? Is it not to put us in a state to nurse Him, by making our heart and our will His? (He has really told us that nursing our Patients is nursing Him.) God asks the heart: that is, that we should consecrate all our self to Him—within as well as without, within even more than without—in doing the Nursing work He has given each one of us here to do.
Is it not to have the spirit of love, of courtesy, of justice, of right, of gentleness, of meekness, in our Training School; the spirit of truth, of integrity, of energy and activity, of purity, which He is, in our Hospital? This it is to worship God in spirit and in truth. And we need not wait to go into a church, or even to kneel down at prayer, for this worship.