I'm No Superman

Every once in a while, I’ll see a stately older gentleman walking down the street.  I’m not talking about any individual in particular – rather the kind of man who looks like Santa Claus on vacation, undercover from the North Pole.  Perhaps he’s wearing a brown tweed jacket with a golf cap, or a suit with a silk handkerchief poking out of the breast pocket.  Maybe clutching a newspaper or a cane that’s seen better days.  But the one thing that doesn’t change is the splendid, flowing silver beard, hoary with age and wisdom.  On such occasions, I often have a strong urge to run up to said person and ask him for wisdom, some tidbit about the meaning of life.  Because maybe, just maybe, one day I’ll actually run into God on the street.

Lately, I’ve been in a pensive kind of mood, some of it brought on by my grandmother’s death, some from going through The Purpose Driven Life together with a friend, some from repeated uprootings for medical school interviews and being able to step out of the Baltimore bubble and see what life is like elsewhere.  In any event, I’ve been thinking about what I want to get out of life.  What things are important to me.  Where meaning comes from.  The longer I live, the more firmly I believe that there is no final meaning or satisfaction outside of Christ.  And I don’t mean ‘personally, for me, I believe that Christ gives me meaning’ – I mean, period.  I may try frantically to search for meaning within myself, or piece together a conjecture of what life is all about from the philosophical musings of men more intelligent than I, but in the end, there really can only be one truth and one objective Reality – that which (THE single, final, ultimate, and true) God dictates.  Even in science, once you get past the hypothesizing and testing and whatnot, you find that things work a certain way.  Atoms.  Enzymes.  Electromagnetic energy.  There’s no quibbling about the fundamentals – you can’t just say ‘well, I believe…’ because things just are the way they are.  It makes sense that it’s the same way spiritually.  Things operate a certain way.  There is a God, and if He says something’s a certain way, then that’s the way it is.  There is one objective spiritual Reality that governs our Universe.  And if I don’t understand it, it isn’t that there isn’t a answer – it’s that either the answer is as yet unknown or that it is unknowable on this side of Eternity.  So it makes sense (for me at least) not to waste time on unnecessary theological arcana but to concern myself with practical matters of the here and now of living, based on what God has set forth in His revelation.

The wisest man who ever lived had some pretty interesting thoughts on earthly pursuits.  "‘Meaningless! Meaningless!’ says the Teacher.  ‘Utterly meaningless!  Everything is meaningless.’"  And this was somebody who had it all.  Wisdom.  Power.  Wealth.  Sex.  Luxuries.  It’s interesting to me that, even in our day and age, people that we envy, that we would kill to trade lives with – the rich, the famous, the powerful, the beautiful – often describe their lives as devoid of meaning.  “A chasing after the wind.”  I’ve often found myself busy chasing after false gods and finding myself in dead end spaces with an aching emptiness in my soul.  Things don’t provide happiness.  Knowledge doesn’t.  The one thing that I have found that soothes the cosmic ache within me – and that only during times of exceptional spiritual clarity, not during religious ‘lip service’ displays – is the meaning in life given by the Emmanuel, ‘God with us.’  The meaning that allows me to see beyond the rat race and the endless babbling of the world and gives new purpose to simple gifts, the intangible pleasures of living, and human connections.

I think a lot of time I set myself up for disappointment because, yeah, I’ll aknowledge that God’s way is the best way because that’s what we’re supposed to believe.  But in my heart of hearts, I don’t believe that at all.  Because I know what I want, and besides, God’s way is bland and boring.  But I’ve never found what I was looking for when I stubbornly demanded to go my own way.  My conclusion is that, as a human, my plans and my wisdom and my abilities are utterly, pitifully lacking.  I can't do this all on my own - I'm no Superman.  And if what Jesus – the ultimate arbiter of Reality – if what He says is true, that following Him gives us truly abundant life, then I want that.  I’m tired of chasing the wrong stuff and having nothing to show for it.  I don’t want to follow Jesus out of religious obligation – I want to follow Him because that’s the best, and in seeking what the Lord has/wants for me, I will find true completeness and satisfaction and life.  In a way, that’s ‘selfish’ – but in a good way   Not gonna lie, I want to go after the important things in life.  It's too short to waste time on stuff that's not gonna last.

So…here’s to that for the new year.  Letting to of what’s holding me back, and taking hold of what really matters.

PTim.

Currently Slumdog Millionaire By Original Soundtrack Jai Ho see related

Slumdog Millionaire

Currently Here Right Now By Graham Colton Best Days see related

Here comes the rest of our lives

Currently Indiana By Jon McLaughlin Beautiful Disaster see related

Scattered...but I'm back :P

Sorry that I’ve been so scattered for the past few months, things have been freaking crazy.  So, when I left you guys, I had just finished typing up my personal statement for medical school.  I heard that last year was a tough year for applicants, i.e. many super-qualified people had not gotten in anywhere, so I decided to play it as safe as I could.  Medical school application is a lot like applying to college – you first send out a ‘Common Application’ to all the schools that you’re applying to (known as the ‘primary’ application) and then, if the school is interested in you, it will send you its own individual application to fill out (the ‘secondary’ application).  Not wanting to take my chances, I applied to 31 schools for my primary.  Which…added up to a nice big chunk of dough.  And then the horror of the secondaries set in.  Each school has a different set of essay questions that they have applicants fill out, each with different topics, word limits, etc.  One even had us write a several-thousand character autobiography.  So…I hadn’t really been around for the past few months because I’d been working on applications day and night.  It was pretty grueling…work, 9 to 5, and then apps ever after that.  Blah.  I recently finished my last secondary though (I decided to just complete 15 – at $85 – 150 apiece, it got a bit hefty after a few), and so things are a bit more settled now.  I am still working and traveling around the East Coast for interviews.

In October, my grandmother died.  She suffered from congestive heart failure, but it was peaceful – she was surrounded by loved ones until the end.  This happened right before my first medical school interview, and at first my parents didn’t want me to know, so as not to affect my state of mind while preparing for the thing.  Oh, Asian parents :P  In any event, it was my first death in the family, so it was a very new kind of experience for me.  During the initial period, I didn’t really know how to respond to it – I felt bad that I wasn’t feeling anything.  And then, at the funeral, I was all fidgety and kept joking around under my breath with my sister.  I guess that kinda stuff happens when you don’t know how to deal.  But…in one sense, I was peaceful because I knew that she walked with the Lord, and that she was walking with Him in a more literal, pain-free, amazing way now.  It also impressed on me, though, that life is short.  Who knows who’s gonna be around, even tomorrow?  So that makes my heart for reaching out to people with the love of Christ even more…front burner, I guess is the word?  I also wake up every morning thanking God for the breath in my lungs.  I used to complain about the life I have, but actually I have things pretty good.  Dead people cannot boast such luxuries.

Ever since my bout with depression a few years ago, I have been much more sensitive to just finding the beauty in everyday life.  I’d describe my life in one word nowadays – grateful.  Grateful for everything that God has done for me, and grateful for the opportunities that lie ahead.  Despite the destitution and pain that I see walking through Baltimore every day, I know that there is still beauty and that Jesus Christ is still our living Hope.  And that keeps me going.

I went to a concert on Saturday with a friend, in Annapolis.  A bunch of acoustic singer-songwriters in a small tavern.  Then we walked to the pier and up the stairs to Buddy’s Crabs and Ribs.  Ate a nice meal with a powdery snow falling outside.  Life is beautiful.

Oh, and this song is great.  I think it resonates with a lot of girls, and I daresay with a lot of guys too.

Scattered :P

PTim.

Currently Listening Illinois By Sufjan Stevens Chicago see related

Because the Writing Center said the first one was crap...

It began with a realization that sandwiches would not cut it. Sophomore year had just ended; along with a dozen other Hopkins students, I had volunteered for a weeklong service trip to the heart of Baltimore’s inner city. One Friday, we found ourselves in a sprawling concrete park, distributing peanut butter sandwiches and bottles of water to its homeless inhabitants. Most accepted the food with a simple word of thanks and left. Seamus, however, was different. An affable man with a tangle of red hair, he had once studied philosophy at a respected university before a series of psychotic episodes forced him out of school. When the hallucinations became too much for them to handle, Seamus’ family relinquished him to the mercy of the streets; devoid of support, he turned to alcohol and illicit substances to quell the incessant voices within. By the time we met, the ravages of drugs were evident in his collapsed veins, failing liver, and tremorous, emaciated frame. Seamus needed far more than our team could provide with a bag lunch. He and I struck up an unlikely friendship which would extend beyond that summer; over the next few years, I did my best to offer what help I could, directing him to transitional housing and addiction services, consoling him when he received news of his daughter’s death. We saw our share of victories, such as the time he found a temporary job in construction. More often, however, Seamus would vanish for months on end; it broke my heart whenever I would meet him again, sitting outside of a convenience store with the telltale bottle at his feet.

What was it about my friend and his plight that struck such a deep chord within me? Perhaps it was my own experiences growing up with a mentally-ill sibling. As a toddler, my older brother Johnny was diagnosed with autism; later, bipolar disorder also surfaced. Ordinarily a quiet boy who loved coloring and listening to my parents’ old Chinese cassettes, at fifteen Johnny suddenly developed severe side effects to his psychotropic regimen. He became prone to unpredictable bursts of violence; one night, I was even awakened by his fists. When Johnny’s condition became unmanageable at home, my parents, having no alternative, brought him to a residential program for severe behavior disorders. The next few years, we made the long trek Upstate to visit as often as we could. I remember vividly the smell of disinfectant that clung to the premises; Johnny’s blank, dejected gaze; my mother’s sobs as we drove home without him. My brother’s illness gave me an understanding of the immense pressures that such conditions can exert over a person and over one’s loved ones. At the same time, as we brought John to see a long string of psychiatrists, I began to appreciate the power of doctors to offer comfort through healing. Under their care, Johnny recovered to the point that he could return to a relatively stable life at home. Others, like Seamus, are not so fortunate.

This troubled me. With dreams of becoming a research ecologist, I had pursued a major in Biology and minor in Environmental Sciences at Hopkins with gusto. My experiences with Seamus and others like him, however, led me to put my career motivations into perspective. Following commencement, I took a job assisting in psychiatric research with Dr. Harry June, a neuropsychopharmacologist specializing in addiction, at the University of Maryland School of Medicine. The work was immensely rewarding: our group developed a novel gene therapy that produced long-term abolishment of drinking in alcoholic rodents and tested a compound that showed promise in simultaneously treating depression and substance abuse. Even more meaningful to me, however, was the realization that, through scientific inquiry, we were making headway into discoveries that could one day substantially improve the lives of many who suffered from debilitating illness – people like Seamus and my brother. I found myself increasingly drawn to the discipline of medicine as I subsequently pursued meaningful clinical experiences among the underserved and witnessed the fruits of such scientific innovation applied in aid of the destitute. As I stooped to wash and bandage the stump of a homeless diabetic patient’s amputated toe, or spent time with suicidal youth in a psychiatry ward, I could think of few other professions that afforded such direct, meaningful opportunities to connect with and show compassion to fellow human beings.

Louis L’Amour put it best: "Up to a point, man’s life is shaped by environment, heredity, and movements and changes in the world around him. Then there comes a time when it lies within his grasp to shape the clay of his life into a sort of thing he wishes to be.” Though I am blessed to have been able to touch hurting lives as a volunteer, in other instances I could only stand by helplessly as I came to a painful realization of my limits as a layperson. A sandwich can only go so far. Medicine offers unparalleled tools with which to aid the suffering, opportunities to combine erudition with compassion, and profound potential for social impact and advocacy for the underserved populations for whom I have a passion - those who have been brushed to society’s wayside. It is to such a mission that I wish to devote my life.