I'm a Nurse (What's Your Superpower?)

     I know many people who like to collect things.  I myself have gone through many phases of collecting things.  When Beanie Babies were the thing, my sister and I had our fair share of those cuddly little toys.  For a while I collected miniatures.  After that I started collecting spoons from all the different places I'd been.  Now that I'm an adult the Beanie Babies have been passed along; the miniatures have been stored away, and the collectible spoons have gone to the Goodwill.  There's still one thing I collect, however, and that is mugs.  I love collecting mugs because every morning when I sip my coffee or every evening as I revel in the warmth of my hot tea, I am reminded of something tied to the particular mug I'm holding.  I have a rather simple mug that's red on the outside and black on the inside.  It's a reminder of the first Valentine's Day J and I celebrated as a couple.  I bought him the mug with some of his favorite flavored teas and a copy of Marcus Aurelius' Meditations.  We drank all the tea, and the book was lost on J's first deployment, but that mug still remains.  There's another mug J bought when we went to the Renassaince Festival in Louisiana when I was pregnant with Monkey.  It's too big for me, but it's the perfect size for J and the amount of coffee he consumes in a day.  Another mug in my collection has a little cow who seems to be bathing in my tea.  The handle has broken off, but still I hang onto it because J brought it back to me from Spain.  Lately the one I've been reaching for more often than not is this one:

     This mug was a $0.25 find at a rummage sale a friend and I were perusing.  I saw this one and seized it.  I had a moment of guilt where I turned to my friend and said, "But I'm not a nurse, yet."  She urged me to get it anyway to use "as motivation".  I don't think either of us realized how much motivation this one little mug could lend.

     Before completing my prereqs, the words on this mug seemed proud, shouting, "I'm a NURSE!  What's your superpower?"  I would feel so smug as I sipped from it, thinking of how awesome I would be in my new scrubs, and how smart I would sound conversing with doctors in their own dialect, but then something happened.  Every morning...okay, every other morning.  I do wash the thing occasionally ;-)  Anyway, every other morning I would reach for the mug, read the words, "I'm a Nurse, What's your Superpower?" and I noticed that the words began to change.  These days the words seem more cautious, yet more comforting as well, "I'm a nurse." it says, and then it asks me, "What's your superpower?"  It's no longer a competition, no longer smug, no longer overly proud.  It's a challenge to find my "superpower", to find my compassion.  It's a reminder of the kind of person I truly want to be, not just the career I want to have.

     I may not be an RN now, but I can be a "nurse".  I can care and be compassionate.  I can put others first.  I can serve.  So, in a way I can be a "nurse", even now.  The Bible says, "As a man thinketh in his heart, so shall he be..." (Proverbs 23:7).  Others refer the the psychology behind the rewards of positive thinking.  Even more people simply say that optimism, or the right attitude, will get you where you need to go.  I guess I'm calling on all of these principles to make it through the next 18 months, starting with this $0.25 mug.


Now I'm going to study so I can become an RN, and turn that rummage sale find into a prophetic mug :-)

P.S.---If you want one of these mugs for your own, I found them on Amazon.  They even have different colors.