It has been a while since I’ve blogged. There is no one specific reason, but lots of things going on (most all good things). I’ve been doing some evaluating of how my limited time might be best spent. I do believe blogging is a worthwhile and important effort, but there are other important and worthwhile areas to which I would like to devote more attention. I have no plans to stop blogging completely at this point, and perhaps I will blog quite a bit. But, for now the posts will probably be more infrequent than in the past.

Until next time…

In the emergency department, we are continually taking care of patients who refuse to take care of themselves. They continue to abuse tobacco, alchohol, and illicit drugs despite multiple warnings about the ill effects of their behavior. Leap asks:

Why do they continue to do it? Why do they shoot up? Why does that young man with asthma keep smoking? Why does that young girl keep returning to her abusive boyfriend?

Why do they have multiple sexual partners, knowing as they do the risks of HIV? Why do they ride motorcycles without helmets? Why do they divorce, when science has clearly documented the negative effects of divorce, on both the adults and children of divorce?

Why do our patients cut, brand and pierce? Why do they attempt suicide, and often succeed?

Dr. Leap suggests that perhaps science and medicine do not have the answers to such questions.

What happens is the emergency department, where they come with broken hearts and maligned bodies, seeking physical answers to non-physical questions. The modern emergency department is a catalog of the failures of man to cope with humanity’s deeper questions.

They don’t come back over and over because we fail. They come back because they have nothing else to do, and because they idea of their own worth is so distant that any and all self-loathing, self-destruction, self-abuse is simply…something to do, with no ultimate meaning, either good or bad. But they still value themselves just enough to seek our assistance when the symptoms get bad enough.

That’s not a politically correct assessment. But it’s true. Humans are told, in schools and colleges, in movies and music, in books and magazines that the old forms of meaning they relied on are no longer valid. That earth is the end, that morality is quaint but pointless, that ethics are relative and heroes are failures. They are told that faith is irrational. And they do the math. There is no hope.

When there is no hope, why wouldn’t we abuse our bodies for brief pleasure? When there is no hope, drugs are as good as being drug free, infidelity is the same as fidelity, drunk the same as sober, risk the same as safety, death the same as health.

So the next time you ask yourself ‘why is he back again?’ ask yourself if he has any hope. And if you do that, without saying ‘whatever,’ without wishing him dead, without anger, you’ll take one step closer to being a physician who sees into the heart of humanity.

And maybe, knowing the disease, you can help suggest a cure.

I need to be reminded of this during every shift and pray that I can help with the cure.

The latest Truth & Consequences from Summit Ministries explores the significance of this fact for reading and understanding the Bible.

Proverbs 22:6 states:

Train up a child in the way he should go, even when he is old he will not depart from it.

How are we to understand this verse? As a promise to be claimed by parents? Walt Russell explains that in order to understand what a verse means, one must understand its context and the genre of the book in which it is found.

The words of the Bible are God-breathed, by the Holy Spirit, into the human-crafted genres exhibited in the Bible. We find every God-breathed word of Scripture within a genre. Because genres set limits on our possible interpretations of words, if God had not placed the words of Scripture within genres, we wouldn’t understand one word of the Bible. So God has spoken to us “in many portions and many ways” (Hebrews 1:1) through particular biblical genres such as historical narrative, law, poetry, wisdom literature, apocalyptic literature, prophecy, gospels, letters, parables, and on and on. If our literary competence with the Bible approaches the literary competence we have with the morning newspaper, we should be able to jump into any part of the Scriptures and interpret its words accurately. But sadly, much of our Bible-reading parallels our weeping for Bengal tigers after reading a headline in the sports section of the newspaper!

The entire piece is instructive and helpful.

Although we were blessed to be able to serve the folks of Palacaguina in medicine and dentistry, we were privileged to see 131 people come to Christ for the first time as a result of the Spirit’s work through our team. 5 others were reconciled in their relationship with Christ. Following are some random pictures I thought I might share.

The first two are of me and some young patients I took care of:

Here is my interpreter, Lauren (who was wonderful) and in my corner of the school where my “clinic” was set up:

I was honored to go with several folks from my local area of Lakeland, Florida. This is the local contingent:

I was privileged to meet Santiago and his wife, one of several local Palacaguinan pastors who worked with our team. I was able to practice my Spanish at length during a dinner discussion one evening:

Here is a small friend who wrote me a nice letter of thanks on the last day. He said that the thing he enjoyed most about the whole week was when I blew bubbles for him and other children to chase down and pop:

This is the typical landscape of the area surrounding Palacaguina. It is the dry season, so things are quite brown. Yet the mountainous terrain was still beautiful:

Here is a beautiful Catholic Cathedral in the Spanish Colonial city of Granada, which we visited on our last day in Nicaragua:

And, last of all, this is me walking down the aisle of the small boat we were in on Lake Nicaragua:

Mary Ann Glendon, Learned Hand Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, has now declined to accept Notre Dame’s Laetare medal and to offer her acceptance speech at those same ceremonies. I appreciate her sacrifice. First Things has reproduced her letter to the president of Notre Dame in which she offers her reasons for declining. She offers a number of reasons, but here is how she begins:

First, as a longtime consultant to the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, I could not help but be dismayed by the news that Notre Dame also planned to award the president an honorary degree. This, as you must know, was in disregard of the U.S. bishops’ express request of 2004 that Catholic institutions “should not honor those who act in defiance of our fundamental moral principles” and that such persons “should not be given awards, honors or platforms which would suggest support for their actions.” That request, which in no way seeks to control or interfere with an institution’s freedom to invite and engage in serious debate with whomever it wishes, seems to me so reasonable that I am at a loss to understand why a Catholic university should disrespect it.

I’ve been trying, like many Americas, to think this thing through. There is the altogether practical question: Did torture help us? Did it make America safer? Was the information really good, helpful, in thwarting terrorists? Did it actually in fact spoil pending plots? Frankly, the evidence is mixed.

But I really don’t care. Whether torture “worked” or not as an interrogative tactic is far from the main question. I’m a pastor. I think as a pastor, which is to say as a parish theologian. I don’t care if these guys shrieked like little girls on the playground and blubbered out plots for everything from the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre to knocking over Bagdad candy stores as juvenile delinquents. Torture is morally wrong. It is morally wrong, theologically speaking, because it is an attack upon the imago Dei, upon the image of God inherent to every human life.

It’s a mind-blowing concept that the God who created the universe might be looking for company, a real relationship with people, but the thing that keeps me on my knees is the difference between Grace and Karma…

You see, at the center of all religions is the idea of Karma. You know, what you put out comes back to you: an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, or in physics—in physical laws—every action is met by an equal or an opposite one. It’s clear to me that Karma is at the very heart of the universe. I’m absolutely sure of it. And yet, along comes this idea called Grace to upend all that “as you reap, so you will sow” stuff. Grace defies reason and logic. Love interrupts, if you like, the consequences of your actions, which in my case is very good news indeed, because I’ve done a lot of stupid stuff.

Here’s another where he responds to the suggestion to think of Jesus as anything more than a great teacher is lunacy and farfetched:

No, it’s not farfetched to me. Look, the secular response to the Christ story always goes like this: he was a great prophet, obviously a very interesting guy, had a lot to say along the lines of other great prophets, be they Elijah, Muhammad, Buddha, or Confucius. But actually Christ doesn’t allow you that. He doesn’t let you off that hook. Christ says: No. I’m not saying I’m a teacher, don’t call me teacher. I’m not saying I’m a prophet. I’m saying: “I’m the Messiah.” I’m saying: “I am God incarnate.” And people say: No, no, please, just be a prophet. A prophet, we can take. You’re a bit eccentric. We’ve had John the Baptist eating locusts and wild honey, we can handle that. But don’t mention the “M” word! Because, you know, we’re gonna have to crucify you. And he goes: No, no. I know you’re expecting me to come back with an army, and set you free from these creeps, but actually I am the Messiah. At this point, everyone starts staring at their shoes, and says: Oh, my God, he’s gonna keep saying this. So what you’re left with is: either Christ was who He said He was—the Messiah—or a complete nutcase. I mean, we’re talking nutcase on the level of Charles Manson. This man was like some of the people we’ve been talking about earlier. This man was strapping himself to a bomb, and had “King of the Jews” on his head, and, as they were putting him up on the Cross, was going: OK, martyrdom, here we go. Bring on the pain! I can take it. I’m not joking here. The idea that the entire course of civilization for over half of the globe could have its fate changed and turned upside-down by a nutcase, for me, that’s farfetched.

Go Bono!

HT: Every Thought Captive