The Nurse Who Learned Everyone Name

Colleen knows that the man in bay four is Emmanuel and that he prefers Manny, that his daughter calls at ten past seven and not before, and that if you say the word appointment near him he will not sleep. She knows Doris in seven wants the blind left open two inches because she likes to see when it starts getting light. She knows the quiet man by the door is Ray, that his wife died in the spring, that he apologizes every single time he needs anything, and that he has a grandson named Wallace who is learning the trumpet badly.

She learned all of that in eleven nights. She learns it every eleven nights, on every ward, everywhere she has ever worked, because it is the first thing she does and she cannot help doing it.

Every one of them calls her nurse.

Not unkindly. Nobody on this corridor has ever been unkind to her. "Nurse, could I trouble you." "Thanks, nurse." "Nurse, is it him or is it me who is supposed to be fasting." Her badge is clipped to her tunic at the level of everybody's eyeline, and it has her name on it in letters an inch high, and in eleven years she has watched maybe four people read it. Manny reads it. Manny is the exception and she has thought about that more than she would like to admit.

At half past three in the morning the ward gets down to its own sounds. The pumps ticking. Somebody's oxygen. A cart on the floor above going the long way around. Colleen sits at the desk with the lamp turned down and does the notes, and it is a good job and she has never once wanted a different one.

Then at four they bring up an admission, a woman named Fiona who is frightened and gripping the rail of the bed, and Colleen crouches down beside her at eye level, which is what she always does, and says, "You are all right. I have got you. I am your nurse tonight."

And she hears it come out of her mouth.

Not I am Colleen. I am your nurse. She has done it that way for so long that the other version has stopped being available, and somewhere in the last decade she quietly stopped thinking of herself as a woman who is a nurse and started thinking of herself as a nurse who is not particularly anybody. A function. A pair of hands the hospital owns for twelve hours at a time. Useful. Genuinely useful, which is the part that makes it hard to complain about.

You know how that happened, because it happened to you somewhere too. Maybe you are the one everyone calls by your role. The driver. The one who does the paperwork. Somebody's daughter, somebody's assistant, the one who is good in a crisis. And you did not decide you were a function. You just noticed one day that nobody had used your name in a while and that you had stopped expecting them to. You are called by your name by the God who calls the whole starry host by theirs, because Isaiah 40:26 says He brings out that host by number and calls them all by name, and the Spirit has been using yours through eleven years of night shifts in which nobody else did.

He counts, and He also names

There is a line in Isaiah where the prophet is talking to people who had concluded that God had lost track of them, and he does not answer them with a feeling. He tells them to go outside and look up.

Lift up your eyes on high, and behold who hath created these things, that bringeth out their host by number: he calleth them all by names by the greatness of his might, for that he is strong in power; not one faileth.Isaiah 40:26

Read the two verbs, because they are doing different work and the whole message is in the gap between them.

He brings out the host by number. That is administration. That is a count, a roster, a total, the thing a hospital does with beds and a supervisor does with shifts. Nothing is wrong with it. Somebody has to know how many.

And then, in the same breath, He calls them all by names.

Those are not the same act, and the second one is not what you do when you have time left over after the first. A number tells you that a thing is present. A name tells you that a particular one is present, and that whoever is speaking knows which. God does both, at once, over a sky full of burning bodies so far away that most of them will never be seen by anybody, and the text says the reason He can do it is the greatness of His might. Naming is not the soft part of what He does. It is presented here as an exercise of power.

You were never a total on somebody's roster in the eyes of God, and Psalm 147:4 says He tells the number of the stars and calls them all by their names, and the Spirit has been pressing that second half on you for a while now.

You have been called by your own name, not by your function, and it is written in Isaiah 43:1 that He redeemed you and called you by your name and said you are His, and the same Spirit who moved over that line keeps returning it to you at four in the morning.

So when you tell yourself that you are a pair of hands, understand what you are actually saying. You are saying that God does the counting and stops there. He does not stop there. He has never once stopped there. The counting was never the part He was interested in.

He said it before there was a job to describe you by

Here is what I am not going to do.

I am not going to tell you that the ward appreciates you more than you think, or that Doris talks about you to her family, or that somebody would notice if you were gone. Maybe those things are true. They are not the repair, and if I hand them to you, then next month when somebody says thanks nurse in that particular flat way, the whole thing comes apart again. A verdict built on people using your name is still a verdict people can withdraw.

The claim that holds is older than your job and it was made before there was anything about you to describe.

Nothing you do got you named. Not the eleven years, not the fact that you learn everybody in the first shift, not the crouching down to eye level. If your name in His mouth were a reward for competence, then every time you were short with someone at hour eleven it would be up for review, and it is not up for review. He said it first, over a person who had not yet done a single useful thing for anyone, and He has not amended it since.

It is already settled that He knows which one you are, because Scripture said it once in Ephesians 1:4, that He chose you before the foundation of the world, and His Spirit says it again every time you sit down at that desk with the lamp turned low.

That is why the claim can carry weight your job cannot. Your job will end. Your usefulness will fluctuate. The name He uses was in place before either of those existed and is not indexed to them.