Excuse me, could you repeat that please.

One of the challenges of changing job roles is remembering.  Right now, my brain is saturated.  I can’t remember the last time it was this saturated. Memory can be defined as the ability to acquire, process, store, and retrieve information. Memory is indispensable for learning, adaptation, and survival of every living organism. In humans, the remembering process has acquired great flexibility and complexity, reaching close links with other mental functions, such as thinking and emotions.

It is also a tad bit frightening to me that part of my orientation involves a weekly support group for the next 3 months.   I might become even more concerned if a critical incident debriefing team walks through the door.  Often, when one orients to a new job, jokes are made about at least you didn’t run out the door the first day.  To be honest that did happen to me once.  I didn’t run out the door, the person I was orienting did.

 I was a case manager for a local hospice.  My job was to visit my patients in their homes weekly (or daily as sometimes was the case), devise and implement a plan of care.  Sometimes this involved complex dressing changes, treatments or medication administration.  Sometimes I put a load of laundry in.   Sometimes I cooked lunch.  Always I listened.  Many times I was the referee for family disputes.

Once someone asked me to sing hymns over their deceased loved one.  Singing from the Baptist Hymnal is not covered in nursing school.  Fortunately for me, my dad was a worship leader.  So, I was raised singing old hymns.  I know the tunes to most.  Unfortunately for the family and me, I can’t carry a tune.  Not wanting to disappoint and hoping they would join in or suddenly an angel of the Lord would appear singing “Glory to God in the Highest,” I opened the hymnal and the first hymn I saw, “Rescue the Perishing.”  To this day, I cannot believe I started singing that hymn over a dead body.  I am quite sure at every single family get together, that family re-tells the story of that nurse who sang “Rescue the Perishing” when momma died. 

A short time later, a woman asked me to put a thong with Santa on it on her deceased husband before his body left the house.  I learned to rephrase the question, “Is there any I can do?”  I also dropped the question, “What can I do that would help right now?” 

Back to the nurse that ran out on me during her orientation.  It was a normal day a hospice.  Whatever that may look like.  We saw three patients that morning.  At noon, I told her to take a break, get something to eat and meet me back at my car at 1:30.  At 12:30, the director of nursing called and asked, “What did you do to her?  She just left my office and she is not coming back.”  To this day, I have no idea. I didn’t sing or put underwear on anyone.  It just sort of became the office joke, that perhaps one way to help people see if this job was for them, was to see if they could survive a morning with me. 

I am now into my fourth week of orientation and I haven’t thought of running out the door yet and I guess if I do, my support group leader will seek me out and debrief me.  But as far as remembering everything, that only comes with repetition, repetition, repetition.  And while humans are hard wire to remember, we struggle. 

They have been called glimpses, tickles, whispers, bumps or thin places.  That piece of God that sometimes interrupts our lives in a brief instant and we touch the eternal God.  Personally, I can be quite dense and need a shout. 

The reading from the Psalms today is Psalm 78.  If you read the Daily Office daily, you will read this psalm about every month or so.  Let’s just say, I am not a fan of the 78^th.  If I were a monk, I would probably being asking my spiritual director why I don’t like it or the abbot would catch me skimming it at morning prayer and make me pray it 78 times a day for 78 days.  I guess you could say I am glad I am not a monk.  But today, it caught my attention and caused me to remember and to think and to ponder and to wonder and to step into that thin place for a moment. 

Psalm 78 is an instructive psalm as well as a history lesson.  It depicts Israel failed to appreciate the graciousness of God and as a result were punished.  I am not entirely convinced that God did the punishing as much as failure to recognize grace will always lead to a destruction of the gift offered. But it was not so much the theology behind the Psalm that gave me pause. It was the memory it evoked.  And it was odd that last night, I was encountered that same memory and it gave me pause.  And that would be whisper of God.

My Old Testament Professor was quite the gifted teacher and a brilliant scholar. He gave this lecture series called the “Moses and Pharaoh Shuffle” that became infamous.  Most students that ever heard it once, would return semester after semester to re-hear that three part lecture.  I heard it four times.  It was captivating.  Most alumni of that particular college will always use the phrase when connecting with another, “Did you ever hear Dr. Black’s Moses and Pharaoh Shuffle?”  And I thought about Moses and God.  Moses had unique relationship with God.  Tradition says after descending from Mt. Sinai, he had to wear a bag over his head to prevent people from dying when looking upon him.  Tradition says his encounter with God changed his appearance that much.  Tradition tells us he wrote the Pentateuch.  Imagine.  And I think about God and Moses sitting on that bank on the Jordon looking across to the Promise Land.  And I think about how Moses longed to be with God and also wanted to walk into Cana. Moses was bone weary.  Moses was tired.  It had been a long journey.  A long journey in the same shoes.  And the scripture tells us that God buried Moses.  I don’t know if God cried or not at Moses funeral.  The hands that created the world buried Moses.  Moses was buried by God's own hand.

I often forget and often need to be reminded that the same hands that created the oceans, hold the mountains, sustain the world, those same loving hands hold me.  And that is why we need to read the Psalms over and over. That is why people will sit through the same lecture over and over and over again.  We are forgetful.  But imagine this-the hands that buried Moses, carry you.  And try to remember every day those hands.