A call to care and comfort
Confronting some of life’s (and death’s) most challenging questions on a daily basis, hospice chaplain and BIC pastor Rita Wolf says that she doesn’t always have the answers. Admitting this is the foundation of her compassionate service.
On a chilly Thursday morning back in October, hospice chaplain and BIC pastor Rita Wolf climbed into her car and went out to visit a patient named Bart.* Bart had been battling cancer for the better part of a year, and things weren’t going so well. He’d been in considerable pain for some time, and the recent precipitous decline in his health had really taken a toll on his wife and primary caregiver, Linda. Those circumstances, Rita recognized, made her weekly visits all the more important.
While en route to the couple’s home, driving under cloudy skies, surrounded by the rolling amber cornfields that wash much of the landscape of north-central Illinois, Rita did what she often does before visiting a person in the twilight of life: She prayed.
“What am I going to say, God?” she recalls asking. “Speak through me.”
That invitation—“speak through me”—is one of the most important components of her ministry as a chaplain, says Rita. “Sometimes I go to a patient’s house asking God to give me the right words,” she observes. “And then I get in the door, and I don’t have to say anything. Because God’s already there. God’s already speaking. I’m already on holy ground—a place filled with the comfort and peace that can only come from God.” In those moments, admits Rita, “I’m just a vessel used by the Lord.”
And so on that morning in October, as she pulled her car into the driveway of the remodeled farmhouse where Bart and Linda lived, Rita wasn’t expecting a sudden insight about “the right thing to say.” There was no flash of lightening, no dramatic moment of epiphany. Instead, Rita finished her prayer and walked inside to meet with the family.
More than a job
After almost two decades as a registered nurse, Rita—a long-time member of the Morrison (Ill.) BIC Church—had no idea that a single professional development class would change her entire career trajectory. But that’s exactly what happened when, in the mid 1990s, Rita signed up for Clinical Pastoral Education (CPE) at Rockford (Ill.) Memorial Hospital.
“It was an eye-opening experience for me,” reflects Rita, adding that the course helped her to see “the depth of human need, especially in the grieving process, dealing with death. I realized that God wanted me to do something more with my life, but I wasn’t quite sure what it was.”
Soon after, Rita answered an advertisement in her local newspaper. Hospice of the Rock River Valley (HRRV), a northern Illinois-based palliative care agency, was looking for a new bereavement coordinator, a job that involved facilitating grief counseling groups, interacting with grieving families, and running a bereavement camp for children. Knowing that her only qualifications were the basic unit of CPE and “the desire to help people,” Rita applied for the job and was hired.
Though she spent eight years in the role and eventually became a certified bereavement specialist, Rita recognized that “it still felt like God was calling me to another thing. I thought, ‘Okay—now what?’ And then it hit me: I’ve always had a desire to be a chaplain.”
Rita knew that becoming a licensed hospice chaplain would require a lot more than that basic unit of CPE. So Rita returned to school through the BIC’s Equipping for Ministry program.
Now, five years later, Rita’s not only a licensed chaplain with HRRV—she’s also a co-pastor of a BIC church plant, The Bridge @ Beans (Sterling, Ill.), and will be ordained with the BIC Church later this month. Though she loves her work with The Bridge @ Beans (which she leads alongside Bruce Johnson), Rita says that hospice chaplaincy remains her passion.
“It’s more than a job,” she says. “It’s more than a paycheck. It’s a calling by God to help folks when they need it the most.”
Learning while serving
Over the years, Rita reflects, she’s learned the particulars of that call. “When loved ones die, lots of questions start to come up: ‘Why do I have to suffer?’ ‘Will I get into heaven if I’ve lived a “bad” life?’ I know God sends me to these people to help them work through those questions. Sometimes there are no answers to the tough ones, but hopefully, with my presence in the midst of their suffering, some sense of peace can be felt.”
Though she enters their lives as a spiritual guide, Rita freely admits that, more often than not, she ends up learning from her patients and being inspired by their expressions of faith.
“I don’t know if I give my patients too much other than what they already have,” Rita confesses. “I learn a lot from them.”
She recalls the example of a young couple whose infant son faced a terminal prognosis. By the time she entered their lives, says Rita, the parents had already found God in the midst of their confusion and pain.
“They told me, ‘Our baby was sick when he was born, we’ve had him for all these years, and now it’s time to give him back to God. He just let us borrow him; he was on borrowed time.’ Wow. I am blown away by faith like that.”
Such humbling experiences help Rita to realize more and more that she serves others merely as an emissary of the Great Counselor. “God is already working in the lives of my patients,” she observes. “Even if they’re not aware of it, God is working. My job is to help people be aware of it—to know that God is present and working in their lives.”
Recognizing God’s work
On that cloudy morning back in October, Rita found Bart and Linda in the farmhouse’s master bedroom: Bart reclining on a king-sized bed, propped up with pillows and surrounded by heavy comforters warding off the cold air trickling into the room. She also found a number of Bart and Linda’s extended family members—brothers, children, and grandchildren—who had gathered in the house to be with Bart in his last days. Thus, when Bart asked Rita for prayer, she invited the whole family to participate.
"That was really emotional," Rita reflected later. “We prayed out of thankfulness for Bart’s life, for his comfort, for him to be released from the pain, for the love and compassion of God to be poured out, and for God to give the hospice staff wisdom in knowing how to help. There was a lot of sobbing and audible crying, and afterward some said they loved him. It was a powerful expression of the Spirit.”
When the family had cleared out and Rita was preparing to end her visit, Bart—barely able to speak—pulled Rita into a hug.
As she recalls, “I laid my head on his chest and he took his hand and held my head close to his chest, and his hand was surrounding my head. And it just felt so good.
“That’s a God moment,” she declares. “I don’t plan those things. To really meet people where they’re at, to see where they’re in need—sometimes they can’t say it, they can’t verbalize it, so we get to know and to understand them—that’s the work of God through us.
“Often times,” Rita admits, “that does not mean prayer. It does not mean Scripture. It means just being present with this person and agreeing with them. I tell them, ‘Yeah, life handed you an early blow with this, and it’s not fair.’ It’s my job to sit there and agree with them. ‘Yeah, it’s not fair.’
“To hear a chaplain say something like that—without judgment, without a pat answer—that’s when people will start trusting me,” Rita says. “And that’s when they’re most able to see what’s really happening: God is at work.”
* For reasons of confidentiality, some of the names used in this article have been changed.
