Holes in Our Souls

 We need holes in our lives. Our lives are often likened to fire that brings light in the darkness. Too often our fire flicks and dies out long before we do. We are called to be living sacrifices but what we end out as burnt offerings instead. What is wrong in our spiritual life that we cannot be beacon lights that drive back the darkness until dawn? This poem about Fire gives us some insight.

FIRE ~ Judy Brown

What makes a fire burn
is space between the logs,
a breathing space.
Too much of a good thing,
too many logs
packed in too tight
can douse the flames
almost as surely
as a pail of water would.

So building fires
requires attention
to the spaces in between,
as much as to the wood.

When we are able to build
open spaces
in the same way
we have learned

to pile on the logs,
then we can come to see how
it is fuel, and absence of the fuel
together, that make fire possible.

We only need to lay a log
lightly from time to time.

A fire
grows
simply because the space is there,
with openings
in which the flame
that knows just how it wants to burn
can find its way.

If the logs are packed too tightly, without space for air, the log fire often dies. It is the same with our spiritual life. We need space in our lives if we want our spiritual fire to have fuel. Hectic too tightly packed lives preclude this. Our bodies follow certain biological rhythms that require periods of activities and periods of rest. We challenge and disrupt these rhythms to our own perils. In the Genesis records, God worked for six days and rested on the seventh thus setting the rhythm for our lives. There working time and there is non-working time. Note that whenever we consider the Sabbath, we start with working time then non-working time. In the Jewish custom, Sabbath starts on a Friday night where there is dinner, sleep and then Saturday, which is non-working. It starts with rest for our bodies, then rest for our souls. In our work-oriented culture, we seem to have reversed that. We think of work first, then rest. And often our ‘rest’ is more work rather than non-work.

Is it any wonder then that we have no space in our lives? Like a fire in which the logs are packed too tightly, we burn out before our time. Our lives need to have holes, spaces for non-work. Our souls need to be holey in order to be wholly.

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Work, Work, Glorious Work

Work on Prezi

Had fellowship with and spoke to a wonderful group of students and doctors from Universiti Sains Malaysia (USM) in Kota Bahru, Kelantan, Malaysia.

Dilbert: The Way of the Weasel

I have had a great time reading this book. I like Scott Adams' sense of humour and I have enjoyed his other books, The Dilbert Principle and The Dilbert Future. This book is even funnier and oh so true.

Tessellating: Where Faith meets Practice

Jeremy Beckett, Tessellating: Starting out in Medicine and Dentistry, Where faith meets practice, Christian and Dental Medical Fellowship of Australia.

The title was the first thing that caught my eye when a Monash Malaysia medical student lent me this book. I am ashamed to admit that I do not know what it means. It must have baffled a number of others too because on the back cover was a helpful definition: Tessellating = creating a mosaic from small tiles of identical shape.

Being curious how faith and medical practice may be considered identical shape, I started to read the book. The author, Jeremy Beckett was the president of the Christian Healthcare Group (SMA) at the University of Western Australia. He graduated in 2002.

Beckett has set himself a challenging task as he seeks to reconcile Christian faith and medical practice. However, it is not one that is unique because this is a task all Christian doctors or doctors who are Christian have struggled with through the ages.

Before Christianity, the Pythagoreans had struggled with ethical medical practice and their philosophy. The Pythagorean did not only come out with the Pythagoras' theorem of the triangle but also Hippocrates. In all ages, doctors have struggled with faith and practice. For some strange reason, medicine has always demanded strict ethical and moral standards of her followers. Faith and practice is a struggle and creates a creative tension for doctors and other healthcare personnel. This is especially so if one is serious about his or her faith and medicine.

The approach in the book starts with the gospel, the love of the Father, how our thinking are nuanced by Greek philosophies, leading to how we are to live out the Christian faith in the workplace as a healer, community-of-faith member, and disciple. I like his 9 practical tips:

1. everything is spiritual!


2. there is a different ways of doing everything


3. the importance of human touch


4. the value of a cup of tea


5. learn names, and use them


6. write neatly and document well


7. avoid mercenary thinking


8. loving the unlovable


9. …and when necessary use words
   

There are many gems of wisdom in these practical tips. However I cannot imagine Malaysian and Singaporean doctors and dentists making tea for their patients! I do appreciate the gesture as saying “I have time for you.” Nevertheless, a Christian doctor in a government outpatient clinic may have to rethink the strategy as he or she may have to see between 100-150 patients per session!

This is a good book for medical and dental students to read. They need to be ready to engage their Christian belief and their medical practice in context of where they are. Medical and dental students must build up the foundations of their faith before they graduate because the final examination they will face is not in the final MBBS but in their daily workplace for the next 20-30 years.

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