Hi friends, it's been awhile, hasn't it? I've had way too many thoughts filling my mind and heart and have found for awhile a greater need for silence than for spewing. Nursing school is still incredibly challenging, but it is going well. This summer as we have gotten heavier in our clinical experiences with OB/GYN and next with Medical/Surgical rotations, I find that we are moving into the next stage of learning - integrating and applying all that book knowledge that we crammed into year one: Looking at the patient before us with this health condition on top of that one, determining what their priority needs are, explaining to ourselves and our preceptors and the patients why they need each of their meds and what the side effects can be, and doing the work of a nurse! I feel awkward, exhilarated, scared, excited, in my element but in the clumsiest kind of way, overwhelmed, but realizing that we really do know more than we think we do. I still have a long list of fears and inadequacies that I feel on a daily basis at the prospect of becoming a real nurse, but my voice teacher described it so well yesterday in telling me how he encourages those students of his who have less patience with themselves and often throw their hands up in exasperation.  He tells them that every time they exclaim, "I CAN'T DO THIS...", he tells them their sentence is not finished until they close it out with the word "yet."  So... it goes... "I can't do this...!! (pause) ...yet."  That, to me, is a brilliant teacher. That lesson definitely got tucked away for many-a-future-reference.

Changing subjects a bit, Stephen left for Thailand this past Monday, and will be gone until next Saturday, to serve with ZOE Children's Homes again in Chiang Mai. From his emails, it sounds just as amazing if not more so than the time we went two years ago. They are gearing up to go to a hilltribe village this weekend, as well as a refugee camp full of new, weary Karen refugees who have fled Myanmar due to the persecution they have been receiving from the Myanmar government. My heart wavers around the fine line between excitement and envy/jealousy. How I long to be there with them, but this is where I need to be for now. They remind me why I'm doing this madness...and why I want to be as good of  a nurse as possible...to be able to get back out there and serve in greater capacities. I really, really miss our Thai friends. It's not just "missing" them though...the longing in my heart is indescribable.

I think about these dreams in my heart to make some kind of significant impact with this life God has given me and often I feel so small. Which is good, I think, because I am small and I need to always know and feel that...but sometimes I take God with me and make Him small in my eyes as well. But that's a subject for another post.

For tonight, the thought came to me that one curious way to change the world, wherever we go... is through silence.

So that needs a bit of explaining. Years ago on a missions trip to Taiwan, I remember a morning devotion being on the passage from Philippians 2:14-15 which says to "Do everything without grumbling [complaining] or disputing, so that you will prove yourselves to be blameless and innocent, children of God without reproach in the midst of a crooked and perverse generation, among whom you appear as lights in the world." The speaker noted how the simple act of NOT complaining can make us SHINE like lights in the midst of a crooked and perverse world. While I considered that NOT-complaining was commendable, I never thought of it as being all THAT powerful. Until I started to realize HOW much complaining goes on everywhere about everything in every way, shape and form. A whiny tone. A roll of the eyes. A loud exasperated sigh. A sarcastic comment. An angry expression. And then of course, flat out verbal complaining.

And then I started to realize how I feel when I complain or when people around me complain. Ungrateful. Critical. Proud. Frustrated. Discontent. Unloving. Unworshipful. Selfish.

I have slowly been trying to make it a practice to just quietly move away, when possible, from complainers. Of course I'll  listen to people if they're frustrated about things, but what I mean is, for example, when I am in our general student lounge and classmates start venting together about classes, professors, other classmates... I find that I just need to leave because it does my heart and my mind no good.

I find I have started to gravitate towards those who I notice don't complain. And my heart changes. Content. Peaceful. Trusting. Grateful. Prayerful. A tad less self-consumed. It's really like a breath of fresh air, a cup of cold water on a hot summer day.

There are a lot of really dynamic, go-getter, charismatic worldchangers out there who seem to be able to be involved in all kinds of great ministry and community work, and still maintain a bit of their own personal life. They seem to have the energy and ability to milk 26 hours out of every day. I don't feel that I am that "type" of personality. But I long to make a difference, I long to be used in the kingdom of God for something meaningful. So...I find great comfort that Philippians 2:14-15 tells me I can make a significant difference just by keeping quiet. Let my silence speak loudly, then, dear Lord.

I'm nearing the end of Quarter #2 of nursing school, and finding myself at one of the places I feared the most about this journey. We've passed the honeymoon period, and this quarter with five intense classes (pathophysiology II, pharmacology I, physical assessment, healthcare systems and organization, and secondary prevention) has brought us to that wall. The one with all the signs in red asking, "Are you SURE you want to be here?" "Are you SURE you're really getting all this information?" "Is it worth it? Are you SURE?"

It has been a real battle this quarter, and the phrase that keeps running through my mind has been, "I feel like I'm fighting for my life." My soul has felt dry, and I have felt the costs that have been paid in my relationships, feeling isolated and out of touch with people that I love, care about, and miss tremendously. My dear husband has been the steadfast anchor for the two of us, and his sanity, selflessness and kindness have been priceless for me. I truly experience the grace and love of God through him, and I told him last night that I thank God many many many times each day for his support through it all.

I can tell that my entire class is tired and frustrated about certain aspects of our program. I feel it is really important to remember all we have to be thankful for, and to not give in to toxic anger and perpetual complaining, but it can sure be an uphill battle. I spent time journaling and just felt that it was good and necessary to let myself feel and grieve the loss of the things we have all had to give up. Counting the costs of building a tower means you are honest about the costs but keep the vision of the tower alive. I'm asking God for grace in this journey...and at the same time, I'm also trying to remember that even still, this world is not my home, and there is a greater vision that I need to keep in mind.

Nursing school has been wonderful and terribly hard all at the same time. Just when we get over one big pile of work for one class, there are 3 more piles that appear, and then the next week starts with the same sized piles again. It never quite feels like it really lets up. My biggest struggle, besides just learning to manage all the academics plus still working at Peets 10 hrs/week, has been more with feeling the sorrow of the cost we all have had to pay in our relationships and lives outside of school. Less time, less energy, less ability to be fully present with people and places that are so important to us, because there’s always this hippopotamus (not just monkey – because a monkey is too small and too light!) on our back that is extremely distracting and demanding. That has been a hard adjustment. I have been so grateful for a fully supportive, low-maintenance husband who has quickly adapted to adding housecleaning and cooking to his schedule. Stephen has been amazing.  

I keep thinking about something a friend said, that struggling through the overwhelmedness, the self-doubts, the humbling (and sometimes humiliating) feeling of not-knowing-anything… is all about dealing with the fears of pursuing a dream. I had actually started applying to nursing school about 6 years ago and then didn’t follow through with it. At the time, I just wasn’t ready because of my life circumstances. But as years went on, though I knew I didn’t want to stay in research forever, I couldn’t get myself over the hump of inertia because I was too comfortable, and really, too scared. I made all sorts of excuses. “It’s too hard to go back to school at this point. The financial commitment, all that time, stress, energy spent on entering a new field…it’s too much.” So I sat, and I stopped growing in so many ways.

Now as I’ve gone through six intense weeks of Quarter #1, I’ve felt exhausted, overwhelmed, scared, not quite sure how or if I’d ever get a grasp of everything being thrown at me. And yet in my heart of hearts, I have known this is exactly where I have wanted to be. When I am tempted to complain, and when I hear classmates complaining, I keep telling myself, “But…we chose this! I chose this. And really, we were extremely blessed to be chosen for this program. If we wanted to go do an easier program, we could have, but we decided to apply and accept being here.” Everything I’m experiencing with the stress is everything I was afraid of for so long. But there was a conscious point where I looked at the cost of building this tower, this dream, and decided that it was worth it. Don’t get me wrong, I still complain and I have plenty of “moments”…but I’m fighting to keep the right perspective on the big picture.

I wanted to grow, and I’ve realized that growth really does involve breaking. There’s no other way around it. Growth means you’re taken to a new, unfamiliar place, and your comfort is taken away from you. Growth means that you see the mountain of things you suddenly don’t know, but you’re given a ladder to climb that will help you get there. You just gotta keep reaching and moving. And it’s exciting when you can imagine yourself reaching the top of the mountain…or at least making more progress than you ever thought possible.

So God graces me with moments when He speaks through a professor, a guest lecturer, an article, or a good friend. Professors speak of the amazing opportunities nurses have to transform a person’s dying moments from an extremely lonely time to a time full of comfort and compassion. Guest lecturers encourage us to remember and stay true to our calling, our dreams, and to believe that we can impact communities more than we might dare to imagine. Research articles tell me about the extremely high rates of HIV in Burmese minority females in Thailand who were trafficked into the sex industry, and the articles tell me about the work that public health nurses are doing to care for these precious young women. My heart burns. Friends remind me to be kind to myself and to remain in the One who calls and enables us because it’s not about us, but Him. He speaks to me when I wake up from stress in the middle of the night and gives me verses like this…

“The Lord will command His lovingkindness in the daytime, and in the night His song shall be with me – a prayer to the God of my life.” Ps. 42:8

God has truly been gracious, and I have only just begun to imagine what He might do with this all…

So...after the conversation with “the man who called me Debbie” – whom I’ll call “M” for short – I told Stephen about the exchange later that evening and Stephen found it offensive as well, though he wasn’t quite as riled up as me. I started to process in my mind how I wanted to address the issue with “M”. Being generally non-confrontational, on the meeker side, and one who typically internalizes situations like this rather than externally processing them much, it put butterflies in my stomach to know I couldn’t just keep quiet and let him think that it was ok to say the things he did. He needed to know it was not ok.

The next morning that I went into work, I was headed out of the house and grabbed my purse, when I noticed a small folded envelope sticking out of my purse. I pulled the envelope out to find $40 and Stephen’s church business card inside. On the outside of the envelope, Stephen had written instructions for me to buy the group of men their drinks, give them his card, and tell them the drinks were on him, next time I saw them. He also wrote the verse Romans 12:20 – “If your enemy is hungry, feed him; if he is thirsty, give him something to drink. In doing this, you will heap burning coals on his head. Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.”

The envelope and note stopped me dead in my tracks. My honest initial reaction was, “No, I don’t want to!! Isn’t it enough that I didn’t respond in violent or passive-aggressive anger?” But as I drove to work, I quickly realized that Stephen was so right – that this is exactly what Christ would do… what He HAS done. He takes us past justice: giving people what they deserve … and points us to grace: giving people way, way beyond what they deserve – forgiveness, kindness, goodness. Is this not how God has show Himself to us through Christ: taking our punishment for sin, and extending salvation, kindness, unconditional love, and new life to us?   My heart was deeply, deeply convicted.    All I had wanted was justice – I just wanted to kindly but firmly “set the record straight” and let “M” know what he did was wrong, and then things would be ok for me.   But God used Stephen to point me beyond justice… towards grace.

As it turned out, 8 days went by and I didn’t see “M” and his group of friends. But they came in today, and this was the exchange:

Me: “Hey guys, how are you?”

“M” and friends: “Hey, how’s it going?”  They go to my coworker to place their order.

Me (coming around the counter towards “M”):  “Hey…can I talk to you for a second?”

“M”: “What’s up?”

Me: “So…I wanted to let you know…the conversation we had last week about my name, ethnic background, and the joking around about the internment camp…  well, I found it rather offensive and hurtful. I just needed you to understand that, and I wanted to ask if you could please call me by my real name, and please don’t joke about things like that with me in the future.”

“M”: “Oh…ok. I’m sorry. Sometimes my joking around gets out of hand…I didn’t mean anything bad by it all. And we won’t speak of it ever again.”

Me: “I know, thank you. Yeah…my husband was also hurt by it.  But there are no hard feelings. Here’s his business card, and he wants to treat you all to your drinks today.”

“M” didn’t take the business card, and wouldn’t let me buy their drinks, but he reiterated again that he “wouldn’t speak of it ever again.” And so we left it at that, and the men went on their way.

Even as I write this, I’m still so convicted by how little I truly grasp about the depths of God’s grace. There’s much more that I’m thinking through about this… what does it mean for “racial reconciliation” to occur when malicious slurs and extreme violence happens solely out of deep racial hatred? Is there grace enough to cover that? Now I understand a bit more why it’s so hard for people, and nations, to work towards healing. What does it mean when God comes through Christ to show us a better way to live and love, and gets beaten to a pulp and nailed to a cross because we couldn’t recognize the Light that He was and is?  Is there grace enough to cover that…?   And He shows us through Christ that yes… grace can go THAT deep, THAT far, THAT wide. Christ’s words on the cross were, “Father forgive them, for they know not what they do.” What AMAZING grace. What AMAZING love.

I pray that we would all… myself very much included… know to an even greater degree how great God’s grace is towards us, and towards those around us, this day.

“For when we were without strength, in due time Christ died for the ungodly. For scarcely for a righteous man will one die; yet perhaps for a good man someone would even dare to die. But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. Much more then, having now been justified by His blood, we shall be saved from wrath through Him. For if when we were enemies we were reconciled to God through the death of His Son, much more, having been reconciled, we shall be saved by His life. And not only that, but we also rejoice in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received the reconciliation.”  

Romans 5:6-11

It’s now exactly one month and counting until my first day of nursing school. A lot of friends have been asking how I am feeling about jumping into this program. There are a ton of thoughts and feelings going through me these days, so I thought I’d share as many have been asking.

EXCITED – Orientation Day back in early August was amazing. The faculty and staff made it clear that they had very high expectations of the students in this program, and that we needed to be prepared to adjust our lives around a very intense workload. That being said, however, they were overflowing with encouragement, optimism, and a deep, sincere passion for the profession of nursing. The new Dean of the School of  Nursing was like a stand-up comedian, full of life, and wonderfully approachable. The 2^nd year students raved about how amazing the program was. I just sat amazed, humbled, and so deeply grateful to be entering into such a supportive, passionate, and fun environment. We did, after all, begin the orientation by learning the UCLA 8-clap!

SCARED – I’ve been through one grad school program already…but I have a feeling that this nursing program is going to make my public health program look like a walk in the park. When I look at our schedule of classes, it’s hard for me to figure out how to even fit in the basics (core relationships, grocery shopping, cooking, cleaning, exercising), much less anything extra. Maybe sleep IS overrated. Maybe I should stock up on my discounted coffee supply while I’m still at Peet’s and invest in a small warehouse somewhere. (But alas, Alfred Peet would turn over in his grave to see such a violation of their freshness standards.) I’m praying for grace to remain balanced and disciplined, and ultimately, to keep the MAIN THING the MAIN THING.

SOBERED – As I start reading over my textbooks (go ahead, call me a nerd) and as I took my CPR certification class, it does not escape me that I am actually going to have to know how to apply this knowledge to real people with real lives, real families, real needs, real ramifications. It’s funny…when I get nervous, it shows – shaky hands and everything. My hands shook when I was making espresso drinks for my manager in my barista certification test, and it’s just coffee, for crying out loud!  I often joke with people, can you imagine what it’ll be like if I can’t get the nervous hand-shaking under control the first time I administer a needle to a real life patient?  “…Don’t worry… this won’t hurt at all…!”  Haha!  Yikes.  I wonder what kind of intense situations I’m going to run into. Even though I’ve lost patients and have seen all kinds of suffering and despair in the nursing homes where I used to do research, it’ll be way more hands-on, way more up-close-and-personal, when I’m a real nurse. I’m praying for grace to study hard and learn well so that I can be faithful with what I am eventually entrusted with.

STRANGELY, SOVEREIGNLY, PREPARED – It’s funny, I often feel and say that the past 6 months of working at Peet’s has been GREAT preparation for nursing, from being on my feet all day, to hustling and learning to quickly prioritize when there are a thousand things to be done STAT, to dealing with many different (read: difficult) kinds of people who get their wants confused with their real needs, to staying calm under pressure, to staying connected to engaging people even when I’m exhausted and want to crawl back into my introverted shell for a while, to learning how to serve and go the extra mile when the demands are unceasing and sometimes just plain ridiculous. But it also does not escape me that at Peet’s, when we make mistakes or have upset customers, at the end of the day, “it’s just coffee and no one died.” With nursing, room for forgivable error diminishes drastically. *pause*     As for Peet’s…I’m going to try to keep working there a couple mornings a week, as I treasure my relationships with our regular customers (well…most of them – haha!) and of course, love the perks (some pun intended)! We’ll see how much I can realistically handle.

AWED – Looking back at my journey, I just see so clearly God’s sovereign hand in leading me to this point of starting nursing school. That in itself is another post, and a long one at that. I felt so deeply connected to the Statement of Purpose I wrote for my UCLA application, and it was so encouraging to feel like my heart was just flowing onto the paper. It’s almost as if… no… it simply IS TRUE that He was leading me this way all along, without my fully realizing it…and now He’s just given me this amazing blessing to actually be realizing it – mentally and practically speaking. When I’m buried neck-deep in the books in a few months, I’ll have to re-remind myself that this experience is a gift from God. Please help remind me! I’m amazed to think of the opportunities to serve and reach people in new and deeper ways, and again, I just keep praying for the grace to have a heart to do so for the long run.

It is impeccably perfect timing that I’ll get to attend the 2008 West Coast Healthcare Missions and Ministry Conference just one week before classes start. I can’t think of a better time and place to pursue deeper vision, ask for prayer, and learn from those who have “gone before” and live out incarnational lives fueled by God’s love and compassion throughout the nations. It’s so great to know that this journey is not about something so small as me, but it’s about a God in Heaven who is strong for the weak; tenderhearted towards the orphan, the poor, the widow, the outcast; merciful towards the brokenhearted; and generous with Good News in Jesus Christ for the despairing and the dying. May HE be greatly glorified!