Two Tips For Pastoral Hospital Visits
Visiting people in the hospital is a necessary act of love for any pastor. It is also one of the most dreaded responsibilities due to its awkwardness, gravity, and the unknown. Hospitals can be scary and intimidating places; how do we become better at hospital visits?
While there is no cookie-cutter method for a good hospital visit, during my time as a Chaplain intern, I’ve found these two thoughts to be crucial for any good ministerial visit, especially one in a hospital. You don’t have to be perfect at them, just willing to risk.
One - Listen more than you talk.
This is a tricky one, especially if your response to awkwardness and anxiety is to fill the space! Listening is perhaps one of the most neglected acts of love. To better understand why listening is so vitally important for a hospital visit, we have to understand the feeling of being a patient. People in crisis are being told hundreds of things. Articles are telling them how to think. Their friends are sending them texts. Doctors and nurses are giving them instructions and information. In a room where everyone is talking to them, will you be the one to listen? Will you risk the silence and awkwardness by offering them the ministry of your ears? We must also recognize that more often than not our impulse to ‘fill the silence’ has less to do about our desire to minister and more to do with our own anxieties. Pay attention next time silence creeps into your conversations. Do you give space for people to think and process? Or do you fill the space with shallow words because silence is too strange?
People want to express what they are thinking and feeling. If you use all of the space to talk, you leave little room for them to share their burden. You impart a few nuggets of truth, yet when you leave their hearts will still be heavy for they were unheard.
Next time you are with someone, ask good open ended questions. Seek to listen, to offer silence, and allow them to tell you how they are feeling. Then, once you’ve heard their pain all the way to the bottom, you can offer a response. The goal is for them to feel heard, not for you to say the right thing.
Two - Don’t try and fix them.
As we grow in our ability to ask wise questions and to listen, we will face another obstacle in our desire to help. We will attempt to fix them. Avoid this impulse at all costs. Patients feel alone in the hospital, not because people aren’t in proximity to them, but because no one is present with them where they are. Are they sad? Your job isn’t to make them happy. Our attempt to change the state of someone almost always falls flat, because it isolates people.
I know this feels counter-intuitive. We want to give hope and encouragement. We hate seeing people sad! I understand. But let’s look at what actually happens when we attempt to move people from the state they are in, to they one we want them to be in.
I will give you an example from my own life. I told a group of friends once that I was wondering if people only loved me because of what I contributed. I voiced the question, “Would I be loved and accepted and cared for if I had nothing to offer?” Out of everyone in the group, all responded with “Josh - you’re so insightful” or “Josh, you have so much to offer, God is going to use you in great ways.”
Do you see what happened though? In their desire to make me not feel what I was feeling (a negative emotion) and turn it positive, they left me feeling isolated. I voiced the fear “Will people love me if I have nothing to offer?” and their response was “We love you because you offer so much”. Read their responses again. I felt so isolated. I felt unheard. It wasn’t until someone in the group said, “That must be so lonely…” and then allowed silence. As soon as they didn’t try and fix me or change my state, but gave me space to express what I was feeling, I felt heard. I felt understood. And immediately I began to feel better. Because I wasn’t alone in it anymore.
Our attempts to change people from a negative emotion to a positive emotion always fall flat because it leaves the other feeling isolated. It’s not until we hear them and are present were they are that we can begin moving with them in the right direction. I’m not saying don’t offer hope. I’m just saying when the Samaritan found the guy on the side of the road, before he did anything else he had to jump into the ditch with the bruised man. Isn’t that the essence of empathy?
The next time you do a hospital visit practice these two things. Listening, which requires asking wise, open-ended questions. And being present with the person where they are. Listen to their sadness. Hear their anxieties. Hear why they have no hope. They are not a car in need of a mechanic (quick fix), they are lonely and scared in need of a friend to get in the pit with them. We can only be a light in someones darkness if we enter into the darkness.
Kind of like Jesus did. Continue to risk. Hospital visits are hard. But we truly are the hands (and ears) of God when we go. You may never know the blessing you are in your hospital visits.
Risking with you,
Josh.
