Happy May!
April was a whirlwind, but I will give you a couple highlights and then focus on two juxtaposing events that occurred within 48 hours.
Highlights:
We finished Community Academy (bottom middle picture). I cannot recommend this enough - if you have any interest in what is happening in your local agency, reach out and see if they have a community academy. Boulder is bringing theirs back in the fall and I look forward to being a part of that one as well.
We celebrated multiple promotions and retirements at the Sheriff’s Office this past month (bottom left).
I got to take a quick 36 hour trip to Los Angeles to celebrate my friend, Wendie, and stay with my sister.
Zach and I kicked off our Honeymoon trip to Ireland (more on that next month).
On April 15th, one of my sergeants took his life. I am fortunate that I have not had many personal connections to suicide in my life. At the same time, rather than finding the time to grieve this loss on my own, I worked with our other chaplains to support our department the best we could. This loss will be felt through out our county for a long time.
On April 17th, RMPFC had our Annual Meeting. We had 110 of our Chaplains from around Colorado to meet, cast vision, and learn together. My hope as the Director of Regional Coordinators is to provide guidance, clarity, and connection to our chaplains across the state. Our plan for the Regional Coordinators was to talk through a hypothetical critical incident with the chaplains, not realizing my Boulder team would walk through a real-life scenario just two days before.
These two events remind me how thankful I am for the regional teams. We were only able to respond to the suicide the way we did because of the chaplains in other agencies that assisted. While some of us were at the jail with the other staff, other chaplains were able to be on scene, and our Chaplain, Jan, was able to be with the staff closest to the sergeant. The Annual Meeting gave an opportunity to be together and debrief the event.
