The year began wonderfully and quietly, and I believed it would turn to be an excellent year. Then on January 10th, or 11th, Pam Miller committed suicide. I received a phone call from John Drage informing me of what had happened. We hadn't been very close for quite some time, but Pam Miller is possibly the person most responsible for who I am now today. I believe there are God-ordained moments in time that influence our entire lives, and for me one of those moments came in the winter of 2002, the second semester of my freshman year at MU.
I had grown apart from the friends on my floor I had initially made when their desire to go party and drink and my desire to stay sober led to our no longer hanging out quite so often. On a Saturday night I sat in the 4th floor lounge of Hatch Hall playing old school Nintendo alone, and most of the floor was gone doing other things. Pam Miller suddenly appeared passing through, and having met before she saw me and came and said hello. She invited me to go to the Rock church with her, and not wanting to continue to be alone over the weekend I said yes. I persisted in attending the Rock church, and God's pursuit of my life finally ended with me being caught by a real community. I was already a Christian at that time, but not until college did I really understand what it meant to live like one. Were it not for that Saturday night my freshman year, God perhaps would have gotten me in some other way, but perhaps not. History is already written, and what could have been is not what God allowed. Rather, what God had already known and intended has been accomplished in my life in regards to that perhaps divine moment.
Pam's death left me with a weight of guilt at not being a closer friend. It was the first time in 2006 that I mulled for days and even weeks the "what-if" of whether I could have intervened with something as simple as an email or a phone call.
On Saturday, March 4th I found myself in Chichicastenango, Guatemala, as part of a medical mission team composed of CMDA students from MU, a couple male significant others, intern Matt Page, nurse Grace Hodill, a couple of nurse practitioners from Columbia, and an MS4 from SLU named Tyler Reynolds. The trip was exciting and challenging. It was the first time I was able to combine a love of travel, a desire for ministry involvement, and a passion for medicine all in one activity. It inspired me to continue to pursue medical ministry work in any capacity possible. I was able to do everything from triage to physical exam to prenatal ultrasounds, and I even diagnosed aUTI after making the correct call to order a urinalysis. Succeeding in seeing my knowledge correctly applied was more than empowering. At the end of the trip I visited one of the most beautiful locations I have ever seen or could hope to see; LakeAtitlan. Lake Atitlan is a huge lake that sits in the bowl formed by a mountain ridge and bordered to one side by three volcanoes. Markets, wilderness, water, mountains, all jammed into a relatively hidden valley.
One of the best things about the last test day of my first year of medical school was waking up to a huge hot breakfast, made entirely by Tyler, my roommate. When I came down the stairs, I was met by a very awake and very smiling Tyler who spread before me a meal of eggs, bacon, coffee, pancakes, and orange juice. I was more than prepared to finish the year on a high note after that meal.
Shortly after the school year ended the wedding season began. Starting with my friends Joe and Liz, I attended three weddings in four weeks, being in two of the three. After the wedding blitz of the early summer came some recompense (and there were two other weddings I declined invitations to, not only due to schedule constraints but also for personal sanity). The weekend after Liz and Joe was the wedding of my friend John and his fiance Emily. Two weeks later was Adam and Jessica Fitzgerald's wedding in St. Louis.
The Fourth of July weekend was enjoyable. A camping and floating trip over the 1st and 2nd, and watching the city display over Faurot field as Ray Charles crooned "Georgia" over Ben's truck speakers. I was reminded of one of my favorite movie scenes in The Sandlot, when the kids are so captivated by the fireworks display that the forget their ballgame. I too was captivated by the nostalgia of July 4th, and thanked God for being a free man in America.
At 5:30 a.m., Saturday morning, July 22nd, 2006, my roommate and good friend Tyler Downey was killed in a car accident. My other roommate Chad was driving to St. Louis to catch a flight home, and Tyler was going to drive the car back to Columbia to use. I was home in West Plains seeing family. I heard the news from John, who called me on the phone for the second time in half a year to tell me that another friend was dead. I have written in more detail about this event in Glorification for Him, Sanctification for Us elsewhere. If I failed to believe that encountering Pam my freshman year was scripted by the hand of God in His pursuit of me, I could by no means now deny His sovereign power. I hope that you will go and read this previous entry linked above to understand more fully why. In short, I believe that a large number of things leading up to that event were known by God and that history was playing out in a divine fashion.
The fallout of Tyler's death is still affecting me. Not that I have not found resolution in his death, but I have struggled to find resolution in the community I live in. I have at many times been disillusioned, most of the time jaded, the entire time following struggling with feeling I belong anywhere and with anyone. The world has moved especially fast following the beginning of the academic year, my second year of medical school. I have felt oftentimes I am struggling to just hang on and make it to a point where I can rest. At first the academic year began promising, and I enjoyed my group. One month in I began to feel frustrated with people in my group, and as though I didn't belong or wasn't listened to. This persisted, and lack of community with people in my church led to further depression. After Tyler's death I struggled (and still struggle) to trust in people. A hard thing with community after Tyler's death was feeling that since I was not in the car with Chad and Tyler that I was not as hurt as Chad was at losing a friend. I felt that since I hadn't known Tyler as long as some that living side by side with him for a year wasn't enough to become very close friends. I felt that since we didn't come from the same social circles that I was somehow less affected. I felt that since I didn't want to get a tattoo that I was somehow remembering him less. I was frustrated that some people who I never saw were all that close with Tyler getting tattoos because they felt they were.
My good and wonderful friend Paul Matadeen moved away from Columbia a couple weeks after Tyler's death. Having lived on my couch essentially since Tyler had died, he was a much needed consistency in my life. It was a hard thing to see him leave for Panama City, Florida, but the distance has not kept us from remaining close with very frequent phone calls. If anything, the distance has underscored the need to maintain regular communication to keep up a close friendship.
Not long after Tyler's death the wedding season resumed, and my good friends Ryan Kromann and Kate Germain were wed in August. I remember being very happy for them when Ryan called me on Christmas as he shared the news with friends that he had proposed on Christmas Eve and Kate had accepted. A small time later, Aaron Ferguson and Stevi Davis were wed in the fifth and last wedding I attended in 2006. Theirs was easily the most unique of all, being small, outdoors, and very personal with no groomsmen and only a couple bridesmaids as attendants. So many weddings, regardless of how joyful they are, remind a single male that he is indeed single. Being content as a single becomes difficult when it is far more exciting to celebrate engagement and marriage. It feels as though it is something I have thus far failed in, seeing that there are others younger even than me becoming engaged and being married. I know this is not true, but there is not a large amount of encouragement given to men who are single without relationships to counter the feelings of inadequacy that sometimes attack. Still, make no mistake about how incredibly happy I am for my married friends. They all serve as wonderful examples of loving God-honoring marriages and give me volumes of lessons on how I should conduct myself as a husband in the future.
The Rock 22-hour fall retreat was much needed, and I am still learning how to listen to God and be silent since then. That was the principle lesson of the weekend; how to listen to God and heed his voice in whatever capacity it occurs. Recently I reread a book by Henri Nouwen titled The Way of the Heart. It describes using solitude, silence, and prayer to connect with God, and I am beginning now, a third of the way through life, to grasp the basics of what it means to communicate with God. Or maybe not, but maybe I am relearning what was once intuitive as a child and was lost with the development of rational adult thought.
Following the retreat began a new school block and a new group. This last block of the year saw me embrace a jaded, cynical view of my world and fall deeper into a bleak depressive spell. It was no help that in block 6 psychiatry was part of the curriculum, the study of which will lead any sane person to believe they are losing their mind in some capacity. I trudged on burdened through this block, battered by the lies clamoring for the podium of my mind telling me I was worthless, unloved, abandoned, and forgotten. Thanksgiving break week further pushed me towards feelings of abandonment as I spent the entire time at home with family, struggling still with depression and hearing no word from others over the week. Some solace came one Saturday night in December when I visited some classmates at Flatbranch for a beer and rest, and many of my classmates admitted to suffering with stress-induced depression. Over that same weekend I read an article addressing the phenomenon of depression in medical students and realised that although not good, it is a common occurence.
I have spent the last two weeks of my break recovering. I have recovered somewhat from isolation, although I still struggle to know how to trust many people. I will have much work to do on that in 2007, but I believe God can heal me even if I don't know how to let Him. Eventually He will force me to submit completely. Last night at Drage's house a small group gathered for prayer, and Romans 15:13 was shared. It reads "May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace as you trust in him, so that you may overflow with hope by the power of the Holy Spirit." And there it is. The reason I am pressed but not crushed - hope - exists as a small smoldering ember deep inside me amidst a cold pile of ashes, ready for fresh tinder to ignite once again a burning flame.
Looking ahead to 2007 I have one simple summarizing goal from which many more precise goals will be born. My first and primary goal is to clearly define my purpose. I have a previously written purpose statement, however it is very impersonal and consists of a combination of Biblical verses and principles. In the new year I hope to draft a far more specific and personalized purpose statement, and draft a mission statement that will help me to direct my life. I had mulled over rewriting it many times close to the end of 2006, and it is perhaps fitting then that a couple of weeks ago a speaker at church talked about the power of creating a personal mission statement to help focus your life and help remind you of what your purpose is. Other goals will flow from clearly knowing my purpose: goals relating to my interpersonal relationships with friends, colleagues, classmates, leaders and teachers; my career ambitions; my life ministry vision; time management; and family relationships.
