Quality nursing services should be patient-centric to ensure that the care provided addresses all the patient’s needs and concerns. Spirituality is increasingly taking a major role in nursing practice to take care of the spiritual needs of patients (Connell, 2012). Spiritual beliefs play an important role in the way patients and family members cope with illness. This essay evaluates spiritual disciplines in the context of nursing care. Spiritual disciplines refer to characters and behavioral patterns learned from a spiritual perspective but applied in everyday life to promote spiritual growth (Willard, 1991).
What is your experience with spiritual disciplines? Have you practiced them? Are they encouraged as part of your church or religious experience? Have they helped in your spiritual growth?
Spiritual disciplines are not intuitive and often take effort and practice to achieve. Christianity encourages many spiritual disciplines such as prayer, simplicity, worship, service and giving, accountability, submission, sacrifice, evangelism, learning, confession and fellowship (Willard, 1991). Being a Christian from an early age has given me an opportunity to practice most of these spiritual disciplines. My initial experience was that spiritual disciplines are the end product of spiritual life. Therefore, I saw spiritually mature people as those that pray, learn, serve others, are accountable and exhibit other spiritual disciplines. With better understanding and experience, I have realized that spiritual disciplines are the means to achieve spiritual maturity and receive God’s grace. Spiritual disciplines have played a key role in my spiritual growth by developing and deepening the relationship with God, attaining and maintaining spiritual health, nurturing and cultivating spiritual maturity, and relating spiritual life to other aspects of my life such as career, education and family.
What is the relationship between salvation and the spiritual disciplines (if any)?
Spiritual disciplines are practices and actions that a Christians do to promote spiritual growth and moves one towards the path of Salvation. Therefore, it is impossible to attain salvation when you do not practice spiritual discipline. In Christianity, spiritual disciplines such as prayer, confession, sacraments, humility and serving others are all important in ensuring one gets salvation from sins and achieves a oneness with God in Heaven after death. This makes spiritual disciplines to be important tools on the path of salvation.
What role does our physical body play in our sanctification (if any)?
In order to achieve salvation, one must be spiritually sanctified. There are many things in the physical ream such as sins that draw people away from the path of salvation. Sins affect the physical body due to its limitations. The limitations associated with the physical body are also responsible for suffering. Once the physical body is sanctified through spiritual disciplines such as confession, repentant prayers and sacrament, one can achieve salvation in which the spiritual body has no limitations and diseases. Phelps et al., (2012) argues that such analogies are important in offering spiritual care to terminally ill patients where spiritual practices help a patient to cope with the illness.
What spiritual disciplines are you willing to commit to for the rest of the academic year? These do not have to be new for you if you are already practicing spiritual disciplines.
Spiritual discipline plays an important role in my life, career and education. McSherry, & Jamieson, (2013) asserts that nurses should integrate spiritual discipline when offering care. There are several Christian spiritual disciplines that I already practice such as prayer, serving others, learning, accountability and submission. These are the spiritual disciplines I want to commit myself to for the rest of the academic year. This will include determining new ways to integrate spirituality into the care I offer my patients to ensure they enjoy holistic nursing care services. For instance, the spiritual discipline of life-long learning of the word of God in order to gain salvation can be related to the nursing commitment to life-long learning to ensure patients receives the best care that is supported by evidence and technological innovations.
References
Connell, M. T. (2012). Spirituality and spiritual care from a Careful Nursing perspective. Journal
of nursing management, 20(8), 990-1001.
McSherry, W., & Jamieson, S. (2013). The qualitative findings from an online survey
investigating nurses' perceptions of spirituality and spiritual care. Journal of Clinical Nursing, 22(21-22), 3170-3182.
Phelps, A. C., Lauderdale, K. E., Alcorn, S., Dillinger, J., Balboni, M. T., Van Wert, M., &
Balboni, T. A. (2012). Addressing spirituality within the care of patients at the end of life: perspectives of patients with advanced cancer, oncologists, and oncology nurses. Journal of Clinical Oncology, 30(20), 2538-2544.
Willard, D. (1991). The spirit of the disciplines: Understanding how God changes lives. New
York: Harper Collins.
