WILTON – Veteran nurse Sue Kaplan said her life changed on Dec. 8, when she was called to be the new pastor at the Phillips Shared Ministry in Phillips.
Kaplan, a student pastor, didn’t recognize her calling to ministry right away, she said Monday.
She pondered continuing as a emergency room trauma nurse after 20-plus years and caring for people in a different way.
She believes the calling came in 2001 but didn’t clearly identify itself.
Kaplan was an emergency room nurse in Massachusetts and was helping an elderly woman who was pretty agitated and very sick.
“I needed to put an IV into her and she wasn’t the most cooperative patient,” she said. “She looked at me and I asked her if she was scared.”
She looked as if she was trying to say a prayer, so Kaplan began the Lord’s Prayer and the woman tried to say it with her.
Kaplan said she got the IV in and went about her business.
The woman’s daughter came to Kaplan and asked what she gave her mother to calm her down.
Kaplan said “I told her, I put in an IV and said the Lord’s Prayer with her’ because that’s what she wanted to do.”
The daughter thanked her because nobody had ever been able to calm her mother down in an emergency room, Kaplan said.
“When I was driving home,” Kaplan said, “I had a realization that something had happened that night. Something extraordinary. I mean as good a nurse as I think I was and I think I still am, she had been calmed by prayer and not by my nursing skills.”
It took a couple more years to figure out what to do about it.
After Kaplan injured her back at work in 2001 and couldn’t work, she returned to Wilton where she spent vacations with her grandparents while she was growing up.
She found a piece of land and chose the late Butch Weed to build a house for the family.
While Weed was building it, she said, the two talked a lot about religion and God. She moved to Wilton in November 2003 and had taken a job at a Farmington hospital as an emergency room nurse manager but wasn’t quite sure that was what she was supposed to do.
Weed was murdered in Dec. 23, 2003. His killer has never been found.
“I think losing my conversation partner about religion, I found I was missing the conversation. I missed him, too,” Kaplan said.
Kaplan left the hospital in 2004 to help run the family’s variety store in Wilton. After the store was settled, somebody handed her a brochure for Bangor Theological Seminary.
She checked it out and knew it was the place for her.
Kaplan is a sophomore taking classes in a dual program for a bachelor’s degree and a master of divinity degree. She was hired as a quarter-time student pastor in Phillips, and licensed as a pastor.
“I love it,” Kaplan said. “It was never my intention to be called this early. I never even thought about it.”
On Sunday, Feb. 5, it was another important day for Kaplan. She did her first communion solo.
“It was unbelievable,” she said. “I could feel the power of God. It was just unbelievable and I could feel it being shared with the members of my congregation. I’m just an instrument. It really isn’t about me. It’s about God and this wonderful church family.”
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