I am James (Jim) Burns. Served as pastor and public safety chaplain with fire and law enforcement for almost sixty years. I have had some mountain-top experiences and some very dark valleys. I simply want to share some reflections from my experiences along life’s journey. Doing so, I hope it will make a little difference in other people’s lives.
History of Jim’s Ramblings
I guess Jim’s Ramblings got started from writing to my chaplain friends about some practical suggestions to be helpful to them in their chaplaincies. I picked up a post about an ole farmer’s advice. These little bits of advice were in a kind of a rambling fashion, unrelated to each other with some sort of unsystematic fashion, but very powerful and sage advice. I picked up on this and started writing in a similar fashion of the ole farmer; some ideas from my own experiences, hoping my chaplain friends receive some sort of benefit from them.
As an instructor with the FFC Chaplain Academy, the Essentials of Fire Chaplaincy class for about 18 years, I always seemed be asked about things like “How do I get my firefighters to talk to me?” “How do I get them to trust me?” “How can I get them to accept me as their chaplain?” and things like “Am I just treading water?; am I making any real difference at all?”
From that sense of need, I started sharing articles like, “It takes time to be accepted,” how to sell yourself, “some of the nut and bolts of your chaplaincy,” “the path to Great Leadership” “Self-care,” “On character-building” and things like that. These subjects seemed to be kind of like the ole farmer’s advice – in a random way, not particularly in any systematic order, yet had some degree of wisdom from real life-experiences to newly appointed chaplains. I felt a need to share from my years of experience to those guys from the heart. These little random ramblings just sort of developed into Jim’s Ramblings
I thought of putting the work together as “Sage Wisdom from an Ole Chaplain,” and I even thought about “Jim’s Philosophical Meanderings” but, in hindsight that would not be true because I’ve never had an original philosophical thought in my life. So, those articles just became “Jim’s Ramblings.” So, to share some of those little articles to a wider audience I developed this website for all to read. So, as Paul Harvey used to say, “That’s the rest of the story.”
You can write in: Jim’s Resume in the search area at the right of the site and you can access my full resume. You can write in: Jim’s STP to see my Spiritual and Theological Passages. You can write in: Statement of Faith to see basically what I believe.
Contact me
chaplainjim413@gmail.com