request

make me a sinner and forgive me

despise me but love me

make me homeless and shelter me

lose me but find me

break my heart but heal it

insult me but give me dignity

make me poor and provide for me

burden me but help me carry it

make me blind and show me

make me prideful and humble me

let me condemn but do not condemn me

make me a liar who hears the truth

i am a stranger but please remember me

bus

i've been looking for so long, and frankly, i'm tired. i don't even know what i'm looking for anymore. it changes every day. all i know is i'm always looking. searching for "meaning." searching for that thing that stirs you up. you know, gives you goose bumps. might make you tear up a little. don't let anyone see. i collect those little "meanings." i like to imagine that every experience, good and bad, is part of a path up a massive mountain. there's a part where i climb a sheer cliff face, another part is narrow with lots of thorny branches, another is calm, floating along a river. sometimes my path is terrifying, but beautiful and powerful, like a thunderstorm.

i dreamt once that i was running to catch a bus, but i missed it. i kept running towards it, yelling and screaming, but it just took off without me. i sat down on the pavement, it was dark and raining and all i could see was the tiny light get smaller as it drove away. there wasn’t a single soul left on the road but me. then i started hearing thunder and i was scared. but as the thunderstorm started to get closer and louder, i remember being filled with this enormous feeling of rage. it wasn’t so much that i was angry, i just thought, "i missed the bus, kill me if you want thunder!" i yelled with all my might, and the thunder yelled right back. it was so powerful and it wanted to crush me, turn me to dust. but i held my own. my body's made out of iron, stupid thunder, and my organs are pure fire. and i'm sick of being afraid. when god made me, he placed me above all the planets and stars and even you. i'm life and i'm eternal. my priest once said that a baby being born is fearful because he thinks he is going to die. you’re not going to die and neither am i.

could it be that i was meant to travel this path? if so, why even look for meaning? what difference does it make? why am i chasing after a bus to nowhere? it's heading to absolute nothingness. i will stay here and weather the storm instead.

hello

i had an interesting encounter with someone the other day. i was walking towards the bike rack getting ready to go home when a girl walked up to me. she had short blonde hair and was wrapped up in a long scarf and had a huge sparkly pin of a reindeer on her sweater. she said, "excuse me, do you want to join my bible study?" i said, "sure, when is it?" she paused for a long time then started giggling. i asked her what was wrong. she told me she wasn’t used to people saying yes so she was surprised. she had an accent, sounded russian. she seemed like a sweet person. i asked her where she was from, she said eastern europe and that she was presbyterian. why was she doing this? she said, "the people here are troubled." i agreed just as two homeless men walked by across the street. she struggled a bit finding the right words but i knew what she was trying to say. she told me, "i am reading romans now. i am having trouble accepting that i am saved. i feel half saved, like there is something left for me to do." i knew how she felt. i told her the biggest struggle is realizing how broken we are and how we have to trust that jesus will fix us. i told her that sometimes i wish bad things would happen to me so that i can be punished for any bad things i have done. she giggled and agreed with me that it is wrong to feel that way. we talked about the importance of our good works and how if we believe that christ redeemed us then we also have to live according to his word. it was a long conversation. she told me she was nervous about walking up to strangers and debated whether to start with small talk first, then jump into jesus. she said that's what jesus did with the samaritan woman at the well, asking her for water was just a lead-in, in a sense. we giggled and laughed and on my way home i felt like there just may be good still left in this world.

desert

"i am in the desert alone. i have no concerns with others. i have a burrow in the cracks of the hill. i have hidden my burrow. and i will leave it one day. living where, i do not know." for those of you who recognize the hymn, you know that translating it really doesn’t give it enough justice. this is one of my favorite hymns authored by pope shenouda. as you may know, pope shenouda was a desert monk before he was chosen for the patriarchy. but i feel like his heart has always been alone in the desert. sometimes i sing this hymn when i'm feeling lonely. it's quite comforting, although it doesn’t seem that way from the opening lines. it's comforting because it makes me feel like i have a direct connection with god. how so? well for one, being alone seems to really clear my mind. life is full of distractions, it's nice to get away from it for a moment and think. it's as if my thoughts and prayers are better heard by god, because they are clearer and more intimate. it's like when we say, "lord accept our prayers." to me, we ask god to accept our prayers not because some prayers aren’t accepted, like they aren’t up to code, or god has a prayer filtering machine up there, but because we are asking him to examine the sincerity of our prayers and remember them.

for me, prayer at church is one thing, but prayer at home alone, is a totally different experience. don't get me wrong, church is the basis for growth and knowledge in god, but prayer and meditation in church is often hard to accomplish. for me at least. i don't like looking at people, or analyzing their actions, or feeling like people are looking at me either. i feel like i don’t get enough spiritual fulfillment because i am easily distracted. that's why i'd rather sit in the back row, or in a dark corner somewhere. like pope shenouda in his burrow. i remember in 2000, when i was 13, we went to a service on the night of the millennium, at abouna mousa's church in boston. i guess it was a special time, being alive during the start of a new 1000 years, so during midnight, they turned off the lights in the whole church (except for a few candles) and people were praying silently. it was so spiritual. it was dark, you couldn’t look at people because you couldn’t see them. it smelled like incense and you could hear people whispering their prayers. it felt like you were part of this large force field of prayer going straight up to heaven. it was powerful. my heart was buzzing. i remember thinking, why can’t we do this every week! i wish my heart could live in a burrow in the desert even while i'm in the middle of all of these things that define our lives. it's like when i'm stressed in clinic. or when i have a bad day. i sing another hymn by pope shenouda, "my real country, is above with jesus, my real country, is above with jesus."

saints

when my sisters and i were young, my parents would buy us saint movies from the church bookstore. coptic people, you know what i'm talking about. they were so cheesy, but... awesome. some of my favorites were st. george (making the sign of the cross with this head while asking which side of the poison chalice he should drink from) or st. moses the black, carrying his heavy bag of sand, the weight of his sin. st. marina had a legit scary devil scene. we called him, "shrimp fingers." all of these movies always had something in common. the saints were always so unwaveringly brave and valiant. they were always so willing to die for jesus. at the drop of a hat practically. i used to think to myself, what if i was in their shoes? no doubt, i'd die for jesus. but would i be so brave about it? what if they tortured me? sometimes i would feel ashamed of myself that i had these doubts. in my defense, i was a kid. and the saint movies are a bit misleading. we love our saints so much that we tend to place them above human weakness. and maybe they really were above fear and doubt, i wasn’t there, but my instinct says they weren’t. and you know what, i think god understands. i used to think about the saints, then about myself, and it would put me down. i wasn’t like them. i denied christ all the time. sometimes i was embarrassed by him. and i sinned like it was going out of style, every day. i was such a turd compared to them. i literally felt like a walking turd. and you know what was secretly happening? i was secretly beginning to think about god as a guilt inducing entity. i always thought he was disappointed in me. he didn’t like me, he liked the saints.

fast-forward several years. what has changed? i still sin. still deny him. in reality, if he was disappointed in me then, he probably wants nothing to do with me now. but you know what else has changed? i stopped being stupid. foolish boy, christ loves you so much! he probably thought you were cute, feeling guilty and insufficient all the time. i bet he wanted to take you in his arms and tell you he understands. he doesn’t want to condemn you and he doesn’t want your weakness to drive you away from him. he listens to your thoughts and prayers like you’re the only person in the world he listens to. he's not going to look at you like you’re nothing and move on to more "saintly" people. in fact, he loves it when you turn to him when you’re feeling helpless. he wants to take care of you. do you know what's happening behind the scenes every day? do you know what's happening when you’re scared? his spirit surrounds you. he'd send down an entire legion of angels to surround, protect you and pray for you if you needed it. he's your father and you’re his son. so don't ever doubt his love. you will never know real love like his. and you cannot truly love unless the love of god is in you. don't get it mixed up. you do not exist to do good things so that you might please god. you do good because of the thread of god that exists inside you. lewis says, "he [the christian] does not think god will love us because we are good, but that god will make us good because he loves us; just as the roof of a greenhouse does not attract the sun because it is bright, but becomes bright because the sun shines on it." so shine on little turd, shine on :-)

freedom

poor blog. i've been neglecting you for the past few months. there has been so much going on lately, it's been hard to keep up with it all! i was home in virginia studying for my board exam for the majority of june. and now i'm back in kentucky and have been in clinic for the past couple of weeks. it's been great, my patient family is, for the most part, awesome and i've been learning so much. mostly learning a lot about patient management. how to interact with them in a way that's friendly, but professional. i try to walk a line between being casual and at the same time authoritative. after all, they have to like me, but also trust me. luckily, it seems to be working out great. there have been a few instances where it would have been more convenient for some of my patients to be seen by someone else, but they've expressed that they'd like to stay with me. yay. oh, another thing, toward the end of my first week in clinic, i was playing racket ball and twisted my ankle 90 degrees. crunch. after a visit to the emergency room and a few radiographs i was told it might be fractured. the orthopedist later told me it was a class III sprain, which in a way, is worse than a fracture, because of the longer healing time. but i'm just glad i don't have to wear a cast. although, they gave me a ski boot-like contraption to wear so i wouldn’t have to crutch around anymore. the worst part of all of this is that i have to be cooped up at home most of the day to let it heal. and after watching mtv for a whole night, i've decided i'm going to lock my kids up at home until they're 21.

i didn’t realize i was such an old fashioned grandpa. but wow. the things kids are being exposed to these days. since when did parents start treating their kids like adults after age 15? i'm sorry; a 15 year old child is not yet capable of making completely rational life decisions like their parents can. i watched a show where a 16 year old girl was dating a 21 year old guy. her parents did not agree with her decision, but still allowed her to continue her relationship with him. i don't think i'm going to be a very strict parent, but i don't understand how a parent could let their child have that level of freedom at such a young age. i know someone is going to read this and think, "oh my gosh, he hates freedom. he's going to be one of those authoritative parents and his kids won't love him." but that's not true at all. i remember when i was 17; my dad and i were at the park with some family friends, a couple and their 2 year old son. their son was very rowdy, totally out of control, and the parents usually gave in to all of his temper tantrums just to get him to quiet down. my dad quickly became frustrated with them so during one of the kid's temper tantrums, sternly told him to stop it. it was obvious he had never been scolded before and suddenly stopped and was a little scared. after things settled down, my dad went over to him and gave him a big hug and made funny faces at him to make him laugh. his parents were amazed. he told his dad, "you have to be very stern with them when they misbehave, but you also have to show them how much you love them." and that's how i feel about that. it's not so much that you have to be a fascist dictator, but too much freedom, especially at a young age, is the worst thing you can do for your kids. which reminds me of a quote by timothy keller, one of my favorite authors, in the book, the reason for god.

"freedom cannot be defined in strictly negative terms, as the absence of confinement and constraint. in fact, in many cases, confinement and constraint is actually a means to liberation. if you have musical aptitude, you may give yourself to practice, practice, practice the piano for years. this is a restriction, a limit on your freedom. there are many other things you won't be able to do with the time you invest practicing. if you have the talent, however, the discipline and limitation will unleash your ability that would otherwise go untapped. what have you done? you've deliberately lost your freedom to engage in some things in order to release yourself to a richer kind of freedom to accomplish other things... in many areas of life, freedom is not so much the absence of restrictions as finding the right ones, the liberating restrictions. those that fit with the reality of our nature and the world produce greater power and scope for our abilities and a deeper joy and fulfillment. experimentation, risk, and making mistakes bring growth only if, over time, they show us our limits as well as our abilities. if we only grow intellectually, vocationally, and physically through judicious constraints--why would it not also be true for spiritual and moral growth? instead of insisting on freedom to create spiritual reality, shouldn’t we be seeking to discover it and disciplining ourselves to live according to it?"

i agree with him completely.