Loving leaders are called to weave together the dreams of many into a tapestry so marvelous it brightens the arc of love’s rainbow.  – Erie Chapman

   We carry within each of us many bright and wonderful dreams. Too often, these dreams lie dormant because we are afraid.  The role of loving leaders is to be weavers. The leader need not dream alone. He or she has the opportunity to unify many different dreams.
   Martin Luther King, Jr. did not think up the idea of integrating the south. He listened to the dreams of others and crafted  a strategy and a message of such eloquence that millions could say: "Yes, he is speaking for me and I want to join with this cause!"   
    This is what every great leader does. And it may be what you are called to do at this moment in the history of caregiving. As Nobel Prize Winner Nelson Mandela (left) said so well, "Your playing small does not serve the world…We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It is not just some of us. It is everyone."…

  Mandela speaks grandly. Have you ever thought of your work as serving the world? Most of us feel more comfortable with Mother Theresa’s words that, "We can do no great things, only small things with great love." Theresa scales down the challenge for us. We can serve by doing small things with great love. By doing this, we serve our part of the world. But what are these small things?
   One of the most startling learnings for every caregiver comes when they become a patient. A friend of mine who is a Chief Nursing Officer discovered the importance of "small things" when she suffered a tic bite and fell ill with a condition so serious she felt she would die. As she waited in her car outside a hospital ER, crippled by pain, her husband ran inside. "My wife is a nurse and thinks she is dying. Please come quickly," he shouted to the first nurse he saw.
    As the nurse grabbed a wheelchair to come help, a second caregiver did something I wish I could say was unusual. "Wait," she called to the nurse, "you can’t take a wheelchair out there."
  Fortunately, the first nurse was a woman of courage, "Just watch me," she called back, coming to the patient’s rescue.
   At this hospital, leadership has apparently experienced difficulty in weaving together the dreams of all staff. Any caregiver who uses rules to block the use of a wheelchair in order to help a desperate patient has lost sight of the mission of the hospital. It is the role of the loving leader to either reawaken the dream of loving care in each staff member or to guide them out of the organization.
   Perhaps the best care this nurse-turned-patient got ended up coming from her sister. "She sat beside me, touched my face with a washcloth when I was so sick I couldn’t open my eyes," she said. "I know it seemed like such a small thing, but it was as healing for me as anything that happened during my agonizing illness. The experience changed me forever. I will never again forget the power of small things."
   These "small things" seem that way to some caregivers, but they are never small to patients. The vulnerability of illness can cause many slight-seeming kindnesses to shine as bright as the sun.         
   Fortunately, this patient is not only recovered, but she is permanently changed as a leader. She is now back in an organization where she has deep influence. She will continue her loving leadership of a staff of nurses but will find new energy to weave all their dreams together into a new and even stronger vision for her part of the organization.   
  "I hate that I had to go through such a painful experience to truly understand radical loving care, she said, "but I know I appreciate this work so much more on the other side of my darkness."

   In the mid-nineteenth century, abolitionist Theodore Parker coined a beautiful and now immortal sentence, "The arc of the moral universe is long," he wrote, "but it bends toward justice." Dr. King picked up this message and popularized it during the Civil Rights movement. I heard the line quoted as recently as November 6,2006 by a rising national leader, Senator Barak Obama of Illinois.
 
It is for us to reshape Parker’s language into a dream for American healthcare:

   The arc of loving care is long, and it bends through the hearts of every loving caregiver.

   The arc of loving care is a rainbow. Loving leaders who appreciate its beauty also know the diversity of a rainbow’s colors. They know that the end of the rainbow is elusive. They also know that it is reached when all the colors travel together in the same curved pathway – the one that travels through the hearts of every caregiver who chooses to love.