Story Corps

Story Corps
Originally uploaded by BinaryLA

I love this program on NPR - Story Corps is an organization that lets ordinary people record stories of their lives. This morning, in a story from Atlanta, the story was a hospital chaplain reflecting upon her retirement. A friend interviews her and asks her about the most significant moments in her ministry. The chaplain's answer moved me.

First she spoke of blessing the hands of hospital workers, not just doctors and nurses but the janitorial staff who clean toilets, the people who do food prep, each of them getting a blessing to carry out their efforts. it struck me how forward thinking and comprehensive her ministry was - to honor the work and labor of each person doing the meanest task.

Then she told of a place in the hospital, in windowless rooms, where surgical technicians assemble the instruments for each surgery. They are given an order with patient's name and all the instruments required for that person's surgery. The chaplain said that as she blessed the hands of a woman technician who was doing this work, the technician told her that she'd been doing the job for 40 years and for all that time, as she assembled the tools for each surgery she prayed for that person by name as she added each instrument.

The chaplain said she found out that many of the technicians did this and she talked of the importance of this work that no one knew about - the families didn't know their loved one was being prayed for, the person having surgery didn't know and the technician would never meet these people or know the outcome of the surgery. But each had this quiet ministry, requiring no reconginition of their work.

It would be easy to look at the job description of one of these surgical techs and to list the requirements and duties of the job. But it's impossible to estimate the value of the creativity and energy someone brings to a job, where it's not required and there is no tangible benefit to the worker to do more and go above what's asked of them.