HARLINGEN — Chaplain Joe Jaime entered the room to cheers and fanfare Friday morning as hospital staff, friends and fellow chaplains came to wish him well with a small ceremony as he retires from Valley Baptist Medical Center after 50 years of service.
Hospital chaplains serve a role in medical care, whether the patient follows any specific religion, to be there for patients during times of crisis. Joe Perez, the chief mission and ministry officer for the hospital’s health system, describes chaplaincy as spiritually walking with patients and building a sense of healing and wholeness even when things are unfixable or in times of loss.
Jaime’s chaplain career has spanned half that of the hospital itself, and a joke often told about him is that he was here before the hospital, which has a grain of truth in it.
Jaime was born in 1946 at the original Valley Baptist Hospital, then on F Street. The hospital was also where he attended junior high and high school after the building became the Valley Baptist Academy.
Jaime didn’t know it then, but his time at Valley Baptist Academy started him on the path to becoming a hospital chaplain. In the 1970s, then-hospital executive director Henry Morrison was looking for a Baptist minister, who was Hispanic, to become a chaplain at the hospital — one of Jaime’s professors recommended him — Morrison gave him a call.
“I discouraged him because I didn’t even know at the time what chaplains did. I was a pastor,” Jaime recounted. He was living in Houston, but Morrison tempted him to come to Harlingen and see the hospital for himself with a free non-refundable plane ticket from Hobby Airport.
Jaime said, at that time, he had never so much as set foot on an airplane before.
“The airplane ticket got me,” he joked.
Now, after 50 years of acting as a hospital chaplain, for the last several in the maternity and neonatal intensive care units — every day has been a new opportunity to increase his knowledge.
He’s also shared his experience training other chaplains through the Clinical Pastoral Education Program at Valley Baptist Health System.
As the ceremony progressed Friday, Jaime received plaques from colleagues and a resolution from the board of directors for his dedication and passion— with well-wishes for his retirement.
His coworkers and friends gathered to tell stories about Jaime, sharing their laughter and tears with the man they respected and admired for his years of service.
Jennifer Bartnesky-Smith, chief strategy officer for Valley Baptist Health System, shared how Jaime had impacted her life roughly five years ago when her water broke at 23 weeks at work while carrying her middle son. Bartnesky-Smith, shed tears, as she described lying in a bed at the hospital for seven weeks to protect her baby until he could be safely delivered.
She says not a day went by without Joe Jaime or another chaplain coming to pray for her and her son.
“I don’t think I could have gotten through that time without you guys, and you didn’t have to do that — there was a whole hospital full of people — so I thank you for that,” she told Jaime.
As for the secret behind the longevity of Jaime’s time at the hospital, joy is the answer.
“When you put your heart into any job it becomes a joy, and I just put my heart into it,” he said.
As for the future, he plans to spend more time with his wife of 28 years, Mirelda, and visit their grandchildren and great-grandchildren across the country. Jaime also has a year-and-a-half-old German shepherd puppy training to become a search and rescue canine to keep him busy.
“I’m not worried about where I’m going,” he said.
