St. Paul Lutheran Church Parish Nurse

Health Ministry

Parish nursing is actually changing into Health Ministry.  Health Ministries wants to give people a sense of being well, which is the search for health while admitting the re-depictive possibility of disease and searching for life while affirming life’s meaning beyond death.  This is the process of helping the individual, congregation, family become whole, and look at all aspects of health and not just the physical health of oneself.  We need to look at the body, mind, spirit and soul.  It is a system of healing the whole person.  The perspective of health is a condition of being sound in body, mind, or soul, especially freedom from physical disease or pain; well-being.  Remember Florence Nightingale, the first nurse to bring “health” into the healing process?  She stated that healing was, “to be free of disease and to be able to use ones own powers to the fullest.”  The definition of healing is making sound or whole, to restore to health, cure or remedy; to patch up; to restore to original purity or integrity; to return to a sound state.  To cure is a means of healing or restoring to health; remedy; successful remedial treatment, restoration to health; to relieve or ride of an illness.  Finally the definition of wholeness is the quality or state of being whole.  In order to be “healed” one must be whole.  Of course everyone’s definition of being whole or healed is different for each individual. 

Even Jesus had a sense of healing in his own way.  Check Jeremiah 33:6 and you will see where he not only healed Lazarus who had already died, but also the people around him who now believed.  In one scripture/lesson he healed in two very different ways.