"I got hooked on the grace of this ministry"

This story somehow follows nicely on this post, and tells of a deacon being taken where he never expected — or wanted — to go.

From the Georgia Bulletin:

When Lilburn resident Bob Hauert was asked to find a ministry in which to serve as part of his diaconate formation for the Archdiocese of Atlanta, he knew right away he did not want to work in hospice care.

“I will do anything but hospice,” he told himself.

But just a few years later, now officially ordained for the archdiocese, Deacon Hauert is serving as the full-time resident chaplain for Hospice Atlanta, the largest nonprofit home health care and hospice provider in Georgia.

His “conversion” came after he was encouraged by a friend to volunteer at Hospice Atlanta, “just to try it out.” Deacon Hauert completed a weekend training session and began serving as a volunteer at Hospice Atlanta shortly afterward.

During one of his volunteer sessions, he remembers visiting with a patient who was unable to speak. A little unsure of how to handle the situation, he asked one of the nurses for advice. Just talk to him, the nurse said.

“That’s what I did. I talked to him, I sang to him, I prayed with him,” Deacon Hauert recalled. “Then I looked into his eyes and he looked into mine. There was a connection.”

“It was a very powerful spiritual moment,” he said.

Following this spiritual encounter, Deacon Hauert began to pursue chaplaincy and started the prerequisite Clinical Pastoral Education units (CPEs) at Hospice Atlanta. Through this experience, he served the patients as a chaplain instead of a volunteer. Last October Hospice Atlanta asked him to become their full-time chaplain, serving all their patients.

“It was a whole different perspective,” he said. “And I got hooked on the grace of this ministry.”

That’s just for starters.  Read the rest and see where his journey took him.