By Monica Banks

Clinical Pastoral Education (CPE) is education to teach pastoral care to clergy and others. It’s the main method of training hospital and hospice chaplains and Spiritual Care Providers. My summer internship was spent in the ten-week CPE program at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center. After two weeks of orientation, my assigned units for the summer were an adolescent medical unit and a floor that included general rehabilitation and acquired brain injury patients.

At the end of the prayer

One particular week, I was struggling to connect with a patient on the Acquired Brain Injury Unit. I had met with her multiple times and she always wanted a prayer. Her brain injury caused short-term issues with memory and she was unable to retain information. Each day I visited her, we would pray, a number of times. I would end the prayer and she would ask me to pray… again. She was unaware that we had already prayed. Thinking she was asking for the first time, she would become agitated if I explained that we had already prayed that day.

After five or six days, I too was becoming frustrated and agitated with my own abilities to do the basic chaplain task of prayer with a patient. I voiced concern to the unit psychologist, my peer group, and my supervisor. I simply felt powerless to reach this woman who desperately desired to pray with her chaplain.

A seminar on play

Sometime into our program, we had a seminar on play. We colored, painted, played games and clinically examined the importance of play in health and spirituality. That afternoon, I felt inspired. I bought some bubbles at the hospital gift shop. They were Crayola bubbles, so they were various colors. When I started out on my afternoon patient visits I took the bubbles with me to a pediatric unit. I blew the colored bubbles at the nurse’s station, in patient rooms, and in common areas. The bubbles were a hit. I tucked them in my bag and began the trek across campus to visit my other unit.

On the way over, I began lamenting. What if I couldn’t reach her? What if she got upset again? I prayed for an answer. I prayed James 5:15, “And the prayer offered in faith will make the sick person well; the Lord will raise them up. If they have sinned, they will be forgiven.”

During my initial time at the hospital, I dreaded the physical distance between my assigned units. This day, it took the entire walk, 2,600 steps to be exact, for me to hear God’s reply. The Bubbles. I’m not sure I liked the answer.

How I loved bubbles

I walked onto the unit and the patient was actually sitting in a lounge area outside of her room. I quietly sat down next to her and began blowing bubbles. The yellow bubbles filled the air. I was skeptical of their power, but I kept blowing. After about three or four rounds of bubble blowing, my patient spoke. She said simply, “Oh, how I loved bubbles when I was a child.” Together we blew bubbles for about fifteen minutes. She was tired by the end and grew distant; we said goodbye.

The next day, when I came onto the unit the charge nurse asked me about bubbles and said the patient had been talking about bubbles all morning. They thought she might be suffering from moments of dementia. I told her of our brief interaction the previous day. The nurse said, “Chaplain, do you know what this means?” It meant that the patient was remembering something from the day before. We charted our notes and contacted the psychologist.

That day I visited the patient and she simply asked, “Did you bring the bubbles?” I did. I brought them everyday, and no matter how short the visit we blew bubbles. The patient went on to a rehabilitation facility, but my experience with her has changed the way I understand relationship, God, and ministry.

What is a prayer?

What is prayer? Well, sometimes it is spoken word directed to the divine. Sometimes it’s a long walk across a hospital campus. Sometimes prayer is a deep breath. That day, both the prayer and God’s answer to it was bubbles. If you ever need a prayer, I may not have the right words. But, I hope you will let me share the story of how one day I prayed with bubbles.

Monica is the Director of Youth and Children’s Ministry at Kingwood United Methodist Church in Rural Hall, NC. She is a wife and mother, and is passionate about the integration of food and faith into ministerial practices. This post first appeared at the Wake Forest Divinity School blog. 

Photo: Steve Evans, Prayer Bubbles, Creative Commons