A strange week, indeed.

For the first time in many years, I woke up each morning looking forward to my day in the hospital.  Any person who has known me over the past four years will recognize the preceding sentence as just short of unbelievable.  With that in mind, dear reader, you may imagine I had finally found my niche in the world of medicine. 

Perhaps you would, without feeling confused, until I told you my week was spent in the department of anesthesia.  This field represents the antithesis to all things that drove me into medicine: a desire to know my patients, their lives, and their illnesses.  A desire to celebrate victory over sickness and to use words to diagnose, comfort, and teach. 

Anesthesiologists obtain the minimum information required to keep the patient alive through surgery, a duration of not more than several hours.  Anesthesiologists love to be in control, and will override the requests of patients who lack capacity to make decisions concerning their care.  Anesthesiologists use words their patients will not remember to provide temporary reassurance.  Anesthesiologists are not concerned with lifelong improvement, but rather maintenance of life as a bridge to continuity of care.  My impatient desire for control was finally, finally, an asset. 

And it is here, in this detached confidence and intermittent urgency, that I found myself most at home.  The questions posed by attendings required me to dig out my computational intellect, a part of me that has been silenced by the noisy processing of short term memory required for most rotations.  Reminded me of math in middle and high school, when I always knew the answer before everyone else in the room, and the teachers would ask me to double check their board work.  

I could call this place home. 
But I won't.

Because there is something more important to me than feeling smart.  More important than feeling in control, and more important than getting people to do what I know is best. 

There is balance, and a challenge that will force me to become a person I can hardly imagine will ever exist: gentle, gracious, hopeful and free.  There is a place I can serve, daily, and feel more alive each day.  A method of influence by which a servant can lead and a doctor can be healed. 

This is where I will call home.  

Having recently exited from my teen years (well, not quite recently), I have found within myself a growing dislike for rebellion.  Unfortunately, defiance has become increasingly pervasive in our society, and is no longer a self-limiting disease.  While some degree of residual skepticism and insubordination can be expected through one's early 20's, this unattractive quality becomes almost ridiculous when exhibited proudly in individuals marching through their 20's, complaining through their 30's, and sulking through their 40's.

Several months ago, I reached a point when I no longer wanted to be associated with the organized church.  Going to church was a chore.  In fact, I hated it.  But I knew the fact that I hated it was clear evidence that something needed to change in me, not simply that something was wrong with the church.  Recently, I have encountered attitudes of extreme defensiveness and outright disdain in those who have stopped attending organized worship services.  This attitude, previously, enfuriated me.  Be part of the solution or you're part of the problem, I remember thinking. 

Today, the hatred of structure and instruction does little more than sadden me.  In the life of a growing Christian, there is no room for an unteachable heart.  Rejection of trained authority is both foolish and frustrating.  If a medical student decided he or she hated the way medical school operated, he or she could stop attending classes.  This decision, however, would not make him or her a self-taught doctor, but rather someone who could not tolerate the educational process required to become a licensed physician.  Perhaps one could practice medicine on his or her own, but trial and error (including decision making based on what "seems" like a good idea to the untrained individual) is not the best manner of treating patients.  In the same way, people who attempt to practice Christianity independent of the correction and self-evaluation attending church requires often become proud, unteachable and dangerous.  Their "patients" (the non-Christians they encounter and attempt to "heal") will suffer because of their incomplete training and single-source (self) ideology.   

The church is imperfect, certainly.  But each member is imperfect in such different ways that we can generally keep each other from becoming completely unbalanced.  The Old and New Testaments clearly demand submission to God-ordained authority, repeatedly emphasizing the need for believers to teach and be taught.  Such lessons, generally, are not learned in isolation.  The flaws we reveal in others test our ability to show grace.  The flaws others reveal in us test our ability to accept correction.  Living with, learning from and loving imperfect people is a challenge, but the process yields results that we could not dream of accomplishing alone.  Watching people become trapped in their own futile thoughts, painful experiences, and ever-changing feelings is discouraging.  If only they understood the value of a teachable heart.   But how can they, unless God intervenes?  A disdain for learning is the beginning of death. 

The woman looked shocked.  "You're not engaged yet?"
My initial desire was to point out that while all my Christian friends were married or engaged, none of my non-Christian friends (including most of my medical school friends) were married.  Rather than opening an argument about whether I was more Christian or more medical, I responded with some witty exposition of my rationale for getting things in order academically prior to dragging my boyfriend into my currently unnecessarily complicated education (read: misery).
"Well."  She just looked at me, unsure of what to say.
"Well," she started again. "I'm glad to hear you're so responsible.  By the way, you still look beautiful, just like you always were.  It's great to see you are taking care of yourself."

My response caught in my throat: half-laugh, half-groan.  Still?  Yikes, I'm 24 years old.  I wasn't aware my looks were expected to decline by this point.  And taking care of myself?  Was she referring to my tan, which came compliments of a salon gift certificate that I received for my birthday last October and only recently made time to use?  Or perhaps she was alluding to the $5 skirt that I recently bought, mostly because I was glad to fit into a size 4? 

Regardless, her comment was hilarious, mostly because I take care of myself less than any girl I know.  I don't even wash my face regularly.  Luckily, this regimen ends up keeping my face clear.  I don't pretend to understand why.  Cory often says God must have made me beautiful because He knew I wouldn't care enough to work for beauty if I wasn't. 

If I didn't love and respect the aforementioned woman and didn't know her to be wise (from personal and second-hand experience), I might have been offended.  But since I did, my emotional response was mostly amusement with an undertone of satisfaction.   

Maybe I don't take care of my face, my body, or my self.  But I belong to Someone who does.

Expletive, expletive, expletive.
Such is my immediate reaction, of late, to anything I find inconvenient or less than ideal (including, but not limited to the life choices of others,  my own personal circumstances and violations of my unrealistic expectations).  The unreasonably rapid transformation from serene to irate is indisputable evidence of mood lability, bordering on criterion for intermittent explosive disorder. 

I laugh in the carefully painted faces of girls who speak softly about the value of their gentle and quiet spirits.
Gentle.  Ha.  Not a chance.  Quiet.   No way under heaven.
I am the unproud ownder of a violent, extraordinarily loud heart. 
Was I ever reasonable?
Demure?
Soft?
Or was I just so good at faking that, in retrospect, I was able to fool even myself?

Keep the good in and the bad out: this is victory in the realms of the heart.
My whole life, I have struggled to keep the bad in, not realizing that presenting a more attractive front came at the price of suffocation.  The veneer that covered my carefully constructed image had faithfully prevented good from penetrating, all in the name of duty.

Expletive, expletive, expletive.
An unbridled tongue and a tethered heart.  What a beautiful mess I've allowed my reality to become.

Enough.
Enough coveting others' lives, and paths. 
Enough despising the pasts of those I love.
Enough orchestrating the rejection I have learn to call home.

I may not ever be gentle, nor quiet, this side of death.
But I refuse to remain harsh and explosive, this side of life.
Life and death, blessing and cursing, are laid before me daily.
Expletive, expletive, expletive.
Grace, grace, grace.
Enough for yesterday, tomorrow, and every moment in between.

A girl who can throw a football better than most boys?
A medical student who would beat most ministerial candidates at Bible quiz?
A champion of honesty in a church of Christians who prefer idealism? 

Are we defined by what we are, or by what others are not?
Are our self concepts really so relative? 
If the people around us excel, do we fail in contrast?
If the people around us lag behind, do we set the pace?
Can we know anything, except by acknowledging what we do not know? 
Relativity ruins reality, a race won not by passing others but by maintaining motion.  None of us started in the same place, so comparison of current location is meaningless.  We must integrate the rate of our progress over the rate of our detriment to others.  In the end, we are not judged by the standards of those we ran past.  Progress has always been (and continues to be) a vector, not a quantity.