It's This Time of the Semester

There are some things about this career path that are impossibly hard.

How do I stand in front of 24 state prisoners and teach them medical ethics? They're the ones who really know about abortion, about a stage 4 cancer diagnosis, about losing their parents and kids.

And how do I take this Bible I wrestle with and make sense of it? For my theology and my ethic and my world? How do I tell someone where my hope comes from, why I can say "death is not the enemy anymore?"

How do I choose to uproot my life every 3 or 4 years and start a new degree? How about choose to really know people in those places I won't stay, those places I know I'll leave behind? I can put up walls and be safer but the heart of God is about risk and costly love and I promised to follow.

How do I watch my professor battle disgrace for the sake of the gospel, and still choose to follow in his path?

How do I continue to stand in the gap between what I used to believe and what has been revealed to me now? Between the kind of church I knew before and the kind I now call home. How do I re-imagine my identity from nondenominational to Episcopal, biblicist to liturgical, fundamentalist to welcoming? How do I make this journey when there is no one beside me?

There are so many things that are impossibly hard.

I used to think the church was something to be critiqued; now I think it's something to do. I used to think ethics was black and white; now I know it's gray. Trying to make sense of medicine and technology from a Christian perspective is just impossibly hard, and yet it must be done. By someone. I think also by me.

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