GroshLink

Last week on the Emerging Scholars Blog, I highlighted a few points from PSU-Hershey's Christian Medical Society lunch lecture by Dr. Joe Kearns on Keys of Thriving (Not Just Surviving!).  As we start a new week on Groshlink, here are a few gems from Dr. Joel Yeager's, MD, Family Medicine, PSU-Hershey's Christian Medical Society lunch lecture on What does it mean to be a Christian physician?

1. Do you at this stage in life, happen to a Christian who happens to be a health care professional [Note from Tom: if you are not a health care professional, I would encourage you to fill in your own discipline/profession] or are you health care professional [Note from Tom: if you are not a health care professional, I would encourage you to fill in your own discipline/profession] who happens to be a Christian?  Does your profession define your faith or vice versa?  What is your focus?
2. How does one maintain focus?
   1. It's important for us to be rational/thinking believers.  This is what sustains us during difficult times/situations.  What are your core convictions, that which you're willing to defend, even die for?  Have you developed a Biblical lens/worldview for life which can address secularization/materialism, pluralism, and privatization?
   2. We're called to be countercultural. We are not to bury our heads in the sand or be beligerant, but instead be be truthful according to the Word of God and extend Life toward the God-shaped vacuum in each and every person.  To highlight his point, Yeager highlighted Luke 6:26, There's trouble ahead when you live only for the approval of others, saying what flatters them, doing what indulges them. Popularity contests are not truth contests—look how many scoundrel preachers were approved by your ancestors! Your task is to be true, not popular. (Eugene Peterson's The Message.  Note:  NIV translation, Woe to you when all men speak well of you, for that is how their fathers treated the false prophets.)
   3. Lastly we're to be redemptively engaged in the lives of others by sharing the stories of lives through relationships in community, being aware/open, letting the Spirit move through us.  Get into the muck of life and get our hands dirty.  Yeager noted that the medical degree provides an automatic ticket to relevant conversation in the muck of life/health. 

Tom processing the final point regarding redemptive engagement in the lives of others:  How true that is for a number of health care professions.  Giving it further thought ... whenever we serve another in practical way and give space/time to listening to their concerns, opportunities emerge.  None-the-less, it is true that people many times go to physicians with more on their heart and mind than their particular malady.  In addition, there still is a pervading sense that a doctor knows what he's talking about and can be trusted even beyond their speciality.  Agree, disagree?