The Week in Preview

This coming week promises to be exciting . . .

• I’m carrying the trauma pager this week.  The five resident chaplains at my hospital rotate trauma pager responsibilities, and any trauma or code that comes over the pager this week during the hours of 7:45am and 4:45pm are my responsibility.    Additionally, during this week I am the primary back-up chaplain should one of the part-time chaplains fail to arrive for their overnight assignments (let’s hope that doesn’t happen).  This also means that I catch an earlier train (the 6:15am express) to town and a later train home (the 5:22pm express, arriving home around 6:30pm).
• The Phillies are leading the Wild Card race.  Two months after unloading my beloved Bobby Abreu, the Phillies find themselves in the unlikely position of post season contender.  There is still a week of baseball to play, but for the first time in a long time baseball has hope and meaning in the City of Brotherly Love (nonetheless, the local news/traffic/weather radio station led its sports segment with the Eagles rather than with the Phillies – alas, I live in a football town).
• Blogging takes a backseat.  Blogging will necessarily take a back seat as I spend longer hours at work, more time following baseball, and dedicate my daily commute to researching and creating a 45 minute Martin Luther presentation for a group of junior high youth (mentioned in my previous post).
• First full week of my new daily prayer regimen.  Last week I began a daily prayer regimen using the order for Responsive Prayer/Suffrages from the forthcoming Evangelical Lutheran Worship (.pdf files of ELW liturgies, including Daily Prayer – where you can find this rite of Responsive Prayer – are available here).  The rite is very simple:
  • Opening sentence
  • Our Father
  • Apostle’s Creed
  • litany
  • reading (not in ELW; my addition to the rite)
  • prayer (prayer of the day & collects for morning, noon, afternoon, evening, daily work and before travel – I replaced the ELW collect for daily work with one from Book of Common Prayer)
  • closing sentences

The whole thing takes about five minutes, and is perfect for my train ride, before lunch, or as I walk to the other end of the hospital.  I’ve created a simple sheet with the texts that fits inside my pocket-sized Bible, and another slip of paper that lists the daily readings and the prayer of the day for the week.  Since nearly all of this information is available online, it is very easy to copy, paste, reformat and otherwise create a simple prayer mechanism that works for me.  I’m very excited.

Well, add to that the usual Monday and Wednesday evening routines when The Reverend Wife/Mommy is at church for meetings and Confirmation class ("Hi honey, I’m home!"  "Hi dear!  I’m off to church.  See you later!"), and this will surely be an eventful week.  But then again, what week isn’t?  Have a wonderful week!