Prayer warriors lift up staff and patients

On a Friday morning in the COVID unit break room, Rebecca Sewell leads a prayer, for our staff and our patients.

As the group bows their heads, Sewell asks aloud to:

• Give patients hope.
• Give our staff endurance.
• Give staff some kind of joy – a bit of victory each day.

Sewell’s prayer on Friday ended with this request:

“For whatever reason we are going through this, pull our community together in unity. Give people the grace to recognize the great works our staff are doing.”

Friday was the fourth week that Sewell and a group of “prayer warriors” from Pulmonology have taken time out to walk to the unit’s break room and pray.

Sewell and the team wanted to offer their support, and they reached out to COVID unit leaders about the possibility of coming to pray.

“When I heard how bad the numbers are getting with the delta variant, it broke my heart,” Sewell says. “I don’t know if our staff can do this again. They are troupers, but they have already been through so much. I can’t even imagine.

“I asked if it would even be possible to be there, not in anyone’s way, but close enough to feel connected to them.”

The same day she first asked the question, unit leaders helped make her suggestion a reality. A few days later, she and her team walked into the break room for the first time.

“Walking down the isolation hall was surreal. It was like walking on a sacred battleground,” she says. “We try to keep it a small group. Anything we can do to help people know: we are thinking about you, we are lifting you up.”

Sewell and the team prays for staff and patients each Friday, at 7:40 a.m. It’s a tradition they plan to continue.

“I want to encourage people to stop what they are doing and pray wherever they are,” Sewell says. “It’s good to pray every day, but there is something powerful about everyone praying at the same time.”

Pulmonology staff have posted a paper heart in their fifth floor window, facing our colleagues across National Avenue in the COVID unit.