We live together: let us live for each other’s comfort. We are all working together: grasp the idea of this as a larger work than our own little pet hobbies, which are very narrow, our own little personal wishes, feelings, piques, or tempers. This is not individual work. A real Nurse sinks self. Remember we are not so many small selves, but members of a community.
“Little children, love one another.” To love, that is, to help one another, to strive together, to act together, to work for the same end, to bring to perfection the sisterly feeling of fellow-workers, without which nothing great is done, nothing good lasts. Might not St. John have been thinking of us Nurses in our Training Schools when he said that?
May God be with us all and we be one in Him and in His work!
God speed us all!
Amen in our hearts.
I
These are some of the little things we need to attend to:
To be a Nurse is to be a Nurse: not to be a Nurse only when we are put to the work we like. If we can’t work when we are put to the work we don’t like—and Patients can’t always be fitted to Nurses—that is behaving like a spoilt child, like a naughty girl: not like a Nurse.
If we can do the work we don’t like from the higher motive till we do like it, that is one test of being a real Nurse. A Nurse is not one who can only do what she does like, and can’t do what she does not like. For the Patients want according to their wants, and not according to the Nurse’s likes or dislikes.
If you wish to be trained to do all Nursing well, even what you do not like—trained to perfection in little things—that is Nursing for the sake of Nursing, for the sake of God and of your neighbour. And remember, in little things as in great—No Cross, no Crown.
Nursing is said, most truly said, to be a high calling, an honourable calling.