For as long as I can remember, random people have opened up and shared their life struggles with me. A few years after undergrad,I decided I should learn how to support people well in the struggles they were sharing. I packed up my life and moved to Denver area to get my Master's in Counseling at Denver Seminary. Most of my masters program was spent on the counseling licensure track. Three classes and a practicum short of completing the requirements for my license, I decided the formal setting of a counseling office was not where I wanted to be. I began exploring other ways to use my skills and a friend introduced me to hospital chaplaincy. I quickly fell in love with it and switched my degree to Master's in Counseling Ministries and added a Chaplaincy focus.

I did a Chaplaincy Internship and Residency over the course of 1.5 years at Littleton Adventist Hospital (now Advent Health Littleton), completing 4 units of  Clinical Pastoral Education (CPE) and graduated in 2010. Since then, I have become a Board Certified Chaplain through Spiritual Care Association. 



                       


 
 I worked with teens and college students for 10 years before grad school. Since graduating, I have spent 14 years working with people through all ages and stages of life as a Hospice Chaplain. As a chaplain, my role has been to meet people in the midst of their struggles and provide emotional, spiritual, and existential support to those diagnosed with a terminal illness and their loved ones. Through active listening, engaged process, and assisted exploration of life, I have supported countless individuals through some of the most vulnerable and raw emotional experiences life can bring.

  My work has centered around loss and its many facets. To work with loss is also to work with living and all of the day to day struggles of life. Life does not pause in the midst of grief. Life continues and "normal" struggles just add new levels of complexity and complication to the  grief process. Loss touches everyone from babies to centenarians. It challenges us to explore what it means to live, often times that means living with limitations and difficult emotions. It calls us to struggle with control and role change, explore the past and work on reconciling with self and others. Loss challenges those that are dying and those that love them to struggle with themselves, their relationships, their hopes, fears and everything that life brings up in the moments in between. It leaves us with the choice to get stuck in the hard or figure out how to keep moving and growing in the midst of struggles.
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