Our local Abbotsford Regional Hospital is a new and modern medical centre in our growing Fraser Valley.
The medical staff is committed to providing quality service to meet the needs of all patients using those neat facilities.
One of these facilities is the new chapel, called Sacred Place, available for Sunday chapel services, especially for ‘mobile’ patients.
Trained volunteer chaplains and pastors of various faiths, offer words of peace, hope and love to hurting patients.
It is a known fact, that people entering hospital are usually filled not only with physical pain and discomforts, but also with spiritual fears and worries.
The challenge here is to add members of the chaplaincy team to our functional medical team offering quality service to patients in body, mind and soul. We can’t expect our busy nurses to be chaplains too.
For the last two years, we chaplains were sharing words of peace and comfort with all attending.
Unfortunately, the attendance has been very low. How come? The main reason is, that as far as many patients are concerned, they are not informed of those Sunday chapel services. The small posters in the elevators are not visible to patients.
Repeatedly, we requested the administration to grant us a brief Sunday public announcement, but so far we have been denied this vital service. What is wrong with a brief weekly and friendly public announcement?
I wish our top leaders would see the smiling faces of patients who thanked us for those words of hope, peace and love we shared with them.
Patients who are served kindly in body, mind and soul, are spending less days in the hospital, allowing some waiting patients to enter hospital sooner. Anyway, we’ll keep praying for our new hospital.
Rev. Wally Kroguletz