The .Plan

The founder of craigslist, the free social networking and classifieds Web site, said on Thursday he is not interested in selling out, a few hours after social networking site MySpace was valued at $15 billion. “Who needs the money? We don’t really care,” Craig Newmark said in an interview at the Picnic ‘06 Cross Media Week conference here. “If you’re living comfortably, what’s the point of having more?” Newmark said… “We both know some people who own more than a billion (dollars) and they’re not any the happier. They also need bodyguards,” he said.
–“Craigslist Founder Says He Won’t Cash In”, Reuters, September 28, 2006

On the mysterious will of God:

The plans of the heart belong to man,
But the answer of the tongue is from the LORD.
All the ways of a man are clean in his own sight,
But the LORD weighs the motives.
Commit your works to the LORD
And your plans will be established.
The LORD has made everything for its own purpose,
Even the wicked for the day of evil.
Everyone who is proud in heart is an abomination to the LORD;
Assuredly, he will not be unpunished.
By lovingkindness and truth iniquity is atoned for,
And by the fear of the LORD one keeps away from evil.
When a man’s ways are pleasing to the LORD,
He makes even his enemies to be at peace with him.
Better is a little with righteousness
Than great income with injustice.
The mind of man plans his way,
But the LORD directs his steps.
…The lot is cast into the lap,
But its every decision is from the LORD.
–Proverbs 16:1-9, 33

On wanting to know the will of God:

We may have the wrong motives for seeking to hear from God. We all in some measure share in the general human anxiety about the future. By nature we live in the future, constantly hurled into it whether we like it or not. Knowing what we will meet there is a condition of our being prepared to deal with it — or so it would seem from a human point of view. Francis Bacon’s saying that knowledge is power is never more vividly realized than in our concern about our own future…

I fear that many people seek to hear God solely as a device for securing their own safety, comfort, and righteousness. For those who busy themselves to know the will of God, however, it is still true that “those who want to save their life will lose it” (Matthew 16:25). My extreme preoccupation with knowing God’s will for me may only indicate, contrary to what is often thought, that I am overconcerned with myself, not a Christlike interest in the well being of others or in the glory of God…

What we want, what we think, what we decide to do when the word of God does not come or when we have so immersed ourselves in him that his voice within us is not held in distinction from our own thoughts and perceptions — these show who we are: either we are God’s mature children, friends and coworkers, or we are something less.

There is, after all, a neurotic, faithless and irresponsible seeking of God’s will: a kind of spiritual hypochondria, which is always taking its own spiritual temperature, which is far more concerned with being righteous than with loving God and others and doing and enjoying what is good. One can be over righteous (Eccles 7:16). We may insist on having God tell us what to do because we live in fear or are obsessed with being right as a strategy for being safe. But we may also do it because we do not really have a hearty faith in his gracious goodwill toward us. If so, we need to grow up to Christlikeness, and nothing short of that will solve our problem. Certainly more words from God will not!
–Dallas Willard, Hearing God: Developing a Conversational Relationship with God, 1984

On how we make sense of our lives:

Later, the true significance of what happened would inevitably become clear to me, and I would be numb with surprise. I have done many things in my life that conflicted with the great aims I had set myself — and something has always set me on the true path again.
–Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Oak and the Calf, 1980

The wind blows wherever it pleases. You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit.
–John 3:8

On keeping one’s ear close to the ground:

We look for the big things to do — Jesus took a towel and washed the disciples’ feet. We presume the place to be is the mountaintop of vision — he sends us back in the valley. We like to speak and act out of the rare moments of inspiration — he requires our obedience in the routine, the unseen, and the thankless. Our idea for ourselves is the grand moment and the hushed crowd — his is ordinary things when the footlights are switched off.
–Os Guinness, The Call: Finding and Fulfilling the Central Purpose of Your Life, 1998

Walking on the water is easy to impulsive pluck, but walking on dry land as a disciple of Jesus Christ is a different thing. Peter walked on the water to go to Jesus, but he followed Him afar off on the land. We do not need the grace of God to stand crises, human nature and pride are sufficient, we can face the strain magnificently; but it does require the supernatural grace of God to live twenty-four hours in every day as a saint, to go through drudgery as a disciple, to live an ordinary, unobserved, ignored existence as a disciple of Jesus. It is inbred in us that we have to do exceptional things for God; but we have not. We have to be exceptional in the ordinary things, to be holy in mean streets, among mean people, and this is not learned in five minutes.
–Oswald Chambers, My Utmost for His Highest, 1935

The combi wars have escalated:

The cartels say they are shocked, shocked to be accused of a role in the violence. “Cata is a peaceful association,” said Mr. Mbekufhe, the group’s vice secretary. “It’s not involved in violence.” “See our emblem,” he said, offering an association letterhead with a bird in a blue circle. “We have a white dove flying there.” Codeta’s emblem also boasts a white dove, this one holding an olive branch, above the slogan “Catch the dove for peace of mind.”
–Michael Wines, “Cartels Battle for Supremacy in South Africa’s Taxi Wars”, New York Times, September 17, 2006

Sue has a piercing observation that articulates well what I have observed. I pray it never happens to me.

As I spent time in northern Uganda, I observed a distinct hierarchy between UN officials and NGOs and the local people. UN officials lived in comfortable lush complexes, walled off from the rest of the community. Workers drove around in large SUVs. As an independent researcher, I would walk alongside the dirt roads and observe how people carried on and went about their daily lives…the sudden rush of wind, the loud blare of an engine or horn would sound and all of the sudden a cloud of dust and then an SUV would woosh by speeding through the civilian group, and I would feel humiliated and somewhat disgusted…I apologize, but this image stuck with me because it occurred time and time again. In person, these individuals were honorable, decent, hardworking, but as I looked at how they conducted themselves in relation to the local civilians and what they were really doing, I couldn’t help but wonder whether this was not another form of colonialism writ-large. Rich, white or foreign folk making money and careers off the suffering of civilians in poor countries. They leave when it’s convenient or too dangerous. The poverty and their efforts to do something become convenient photo-ops and by-lines on an impressive resume and list of credentials to tout to colleagues and people back home and a way to step up the ladder of success. Their impressive work is rarely about really alleviating suffering or pursuing justice for the oppressed — it becomes something altogether different — how to make it big, how to become powerful, and successful — how to become the next under-secretary general or big-shot at the UN or some NGO…

Sorry. But this is what I came to conclude about many of the organizations and especially the UN, though I respected and admired the individuals I met within these organizations. Even when I visited the camps, I was appalled at the way these organizations brisked in, offered handouts or workshops on “AIDS awareness” for 30 mins or more and then whisked away…with information to include on their brochures and annual reports to get more money from donors…

Local people hired to do some of the more menial work were grateful for a job that would pay a few months’ salary, but many were not hired for more than a month or two at a time and then they were left to wait for some other opportunity to come their way. But they were not being invested in long-term, they were being used, so that individuals with status in the UN or some other organization could have another report to their name or a project under their title to add to their long list of credentials.

Stolen from AbFab2theMax:

The fear of becoming old is born of the recognition that one is not living now the life that one wishes. It is equivalent to a sense of abusing the present.
–Susan Sontag

Blessed is the mind with something to occupy it other than its own dissatisfactions.
–Hippolyte

On the last night of my two-week-long night float stint, my pager beeped five minutes into the start of my shift. It was 6:05PM. I fought an overwhelming urge to throw my pager against the wall and stomp it into itty bitty bits, and out of the corner of my mouth peeped a restrained, guttural growl. I slogged over to the hospital, anticipating having to admit another suicidal borderline who really shouldn’t be in the hospital or consulting on a delirious patient that the surgery team ought to be able to handle by itself. I felt acutely burned out. That was a ridiculous thought, of course. I am only three months into internship, and the most time-intensive, sleep-wrecking portion of my training has not even yet begun.

Things quieted down by 2:00AM, and I came back home to sleep. Pager beeped again at 4:00AM. One of my attending’s outpatients had just been sexually assaulted, and on top of that, the married man with whom she had been having an affair decided that he couldn’t handle the situation and so unilaterally ended their affair. She was now suicidal, with significant lethality, holding the telephone in one hand and a full bottle of benzodiazepines in the other, and initially refusing to divulge her location for fear that I would place an intervention call to the police. An hour later, I lay my head down on my pillow to sleep once more.

When I woke up this morning, I no longer felt burned out, but I did grasp on to the insight that cynicism has been getting the better of me. I have found myself spending more time writing orders than thinking about the complexities of my patients’ stories. I have found myself cutting corners on the physical exam in order to get a chronic schizophrenic admitted and tucked away as quickly as possible. I have found myself willing to roll the dice with the lives of suicidal borderlines while subconsciously harboring punitive attitudes towards them for siphoning precious dollars away from children withering away in Eritrean refugee camps.

To be sure, I don’t always find myself in such a mode of operation. For example, last night, spending 45 minutes of my time talking down a suicidal rape victim and persuading her to go to the nearest emergency room provided a much-needed check against the perseverative and encroaching nihilistic thoughts about the uselessness of my profession. But I recognize that even these brief episodes of corner-cutting, impatience, and/or disgust are starting to chip away at whatever certainty I used to have that my life heretofore has provided me with the character needed to sustain the hope that I am being a faithful steward of my gifts. It’s very easy to slip under the radar and do only the minimum amount of work necessary just not to get QI’d, but that only cultivates disillusionment and purposelessness, not hope and fidelity.

This quote from Andrew Tozer was passed onto me –

Most of us go through life praying a little, planning a little, jockeying for position, hoping but never being quite certain of anything, and always secretly afraid that we will miss the way. This is a tragic waste of truth and never gives rest to the heart.

— and it reminded me of that over-referenced but truthful passage from the words of the prophet Jeremiah: “For I know the plans I have for you…”

Gentle reminders like this helpfully reinforce the reality that I am not as independent as I think I am. I need help in practicing the politics of resistance.

When I first arrived in this city, I had no expectations that I would have already found a community of like-minded pilgrims this early in the year. These days, however, I am feeling more and more urgently the need to be in a place where that kind of community is a reality for me, because the people I have allowed in my corner are anywhere but here. The community I speak of is a community that speaks truth into my life, a community that illuminates the dark corners of my dirty mind plagued with cynicism and self-doubt.

A few days ago I was reading an essay in the academic journal Modern Theology that was written by Emmanuel Katongole, a Catholic priest of the Kampala Archdiocese in Uganda who also teaches at the National Seminary Katigondo. In it, he writes of such communities:

The thing I find striking about these groups, then, is their sense of resistance as rooted in community. In other words, they bear witness to the fact that resistance is not just an individual thing, because individually it cannot be sustained. If it is to be sustained, such resistance must be grounded within and sustained by the life and practices of a given community. Without such a community, resistance will inevitably fail and may become just another heroic but narcissistic attempt by the postliberal individual to make it into the headlines.

…I am certainly aware that historically Christianity and the Bible have played an ambivalent role in Africa. The argument I am making, however, presupposes that Christianity will be able to exploit the theme of resistance which has somehow always been implicit within African Christianity and thus turn the Bible into a formidable weapon of struggle. What such a recovery requires, however, is the ability to free the Bible from the liberal and individualistic notions of salvation, so that we allow its full potential as the story of a pilgrim community to inspire new forms of community which embody the same prophetic vision of resistance and hope.
–Emmanuel Katongole, “Postmodern Illusions and the Challenges of African Theology: The Ecclesial Tactics of Resistance”, Modern Theology, April 2000

Vacation has begun. Alleluja!

Three years ago, I took a road trip down the Pacific Coast Highway from San Francisco to Los Angeles. That turned out to be a very, very bad experience, and I have been trying to redeem it ever since. What better way to do so than to use a few vacation days?

Rarely losing sight of the Pacific Ocean during its 365-mile jaunt along the Oregon coast, US-101 winds past rockbound coast, ancient forests, and innumerable towns and villages. While the region also has its share of strip towns and places where the timber boom went bust, the beach loops, historic restorations, and more state parks per mile than any place in the country soften its few hard edges. Every 20 miles or so, you’ll pass through attractive, if moderately touristy, towns populated by at most a couple thousand people, but as a general rule it’s the mileage between these hamlets that explains why most people visit: To take in one of the most dramatic meetings of rock and tide in the world.

Between Ferndale and Mendocino, the main US-101 highway heads inland along the Eel River, but if you have time and a taste for adventure, head west from Ferndale along the narrow, winding Mattole Road, which loops around Cape Mendocino through the northern reaches of the so-called Lost Coast, a 100-mile stretch of shoreline justly famous for its isolated beauty. By road, you can only get close to the ocean at a few points—the few miles south of Cape Mendocino, and again at the fishing resort of Shelter Cove, west of Garberville—but hikers can have a field day (or week) exploring the extensive coastal wilderness. Some 50 miles of rugged, untouched coastline, packed with tidal pools and driftwood-strewn beaches, have been preserved in a pair of parks, the Kings Range National Conservation Area in the north, and the Sinkyone Wilderness State Park farther south.

From the coast, a pair of roads—Panoramic Highway and the Shoreline Highway (Hwy-1)—twist up and over the slopes of Mt. Tamalpais (elev. 2,586), the signature peak of the San Francisco Bay Area. Known usually as “Mt. Tam,” the whole mountain has been protected in semi-natural state within a series of state and national parks, and its voluptuous slopes offer incredible views of the urbanized Bay Area and the untouched coastline; drive to within 100 yards of the top for a 360-degree panorama, or stop at the Pan Toll ranger station (415/388-2070) for a map of Mt. Tam’s hiking routes and fire roads.
–Jamie Jensen, Road Trip USA

…until this godawfulforsaken night float is done with.
…until I can get back into a normal sleep schedule.
…until the pager gets turned off.
…until I can start cooking regular meals again.
…until I will have the daytime energy to start rock climbing again.
…until my 10 days of vacation begin!

This weary heart needs a rest. I think I’m getting burned out. And it is way too early in the year for this.

Whatcha doin’ with a suitcase
Tryin’ to hit the ground with both feet runnin’
Aren’t you trippin’ on your shoelace
–Over the Rhine

For those of us who didn’t aim for dermatology:

But we academics do have something few others possess in this postindustrial world: control over our own time. All the surveys point to this as the most common factor in job satisfaction. The jobs in which decisions are made and the pace set by machines provide the least satisfaction, while those, like mine, that foster at least the illusion of control provide the most.
–Tom Lutz, “The Summer Next Time”, New York Times, September 4, 2006