Greatest Generation

After our graduation Sunday I celebrated with my family, the family of one of my housemates in Loma Linda and also with the family of the boys from San Bernardino with whom we've studied the Word of God for the past 3 years. We had a barbecue which ended up being a great way to say goodbye to Loma Linda.

As the various families visited I realized something. I realized how much I had taken for granted a generation which has now all but passed away in my family, that generation which lived through the Great Depression and fought in WWII.

Growing up, listening to various grandparents and great aunts and uncles tell stories about days-gone-by, I was never bored but I never realized what a gift it was to have those relatives around who could relate a story in-person the way a written account will never be able to.

I also was reminded of the fact that people from the "Greatest Generation" do generally seem to have a kind of respectability, maturity and common-sense which seems to have been lost in the upheavals of the 60's and 70's. Like any generation they had and have their own predominant sins and rebellions against God. But I can't help but think that, as a generation, they do just seem better in some way. I wish I could have been as thankful for them while they were still alive as I think I would be now.

With the last remaining relative from the "Greatest Generation" in my family, my 93 year-old Aunt Jo.

M.D.

God brought me through the end of my medical school career today as I graduated from Loma Linda University School of Medicine. Now, by His grace, I will cling to Him as I make my way through residency.

But the Lord is faithful. He will establish you and guard you against the evil one. - 2 Thessalonians 3:3

Loma Linda Hooding Ceremony Prayer

I was honored to be asked to do the invocation for my medical school class' hooding ceremony tonight, a couple of days before our graduation on Sunday. Here is what I wrote and prayed:

Almighty God, we gather before you tonight a people full of gratitude for the many gifts You have bestowed upon us throughout these years of medical school. All good and perfect gifts come down from you, the Father of lights, and you have given us these gifts in sustaining us through many trials and many joys. You have imparted to us a great amount of knowledge and skill through the work of the teachers with whom you have blessed us here and for that we are ever-grateful.

As we begin our practice as physicians make us into doctors who would look to the example of Christ. Let us remember that He came as One not to be served but to serve, and let us do likewise. Let us remember His compassion as He wept for the friends and relatives of Lazarus who had died and let us have that same compassion.

Above any imperfect imitation, O Lord, let us look by your grace with faith to the gospel of your Son, our Lord, which is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes. He became incarnate of the Virgin Mary and out of love for sinners humbled Himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross, for our salvation. He displayed His victory over sin and death on the third day in His glorious Resurrection from the dead and reminds us that as we look upon the suffering of this world, that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory which shall be revealed in us.

All this we ask in the mighty name of Jesus Christ, who lives and reigns with you, Father, and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen.

Resurrección en Guatemala

On Saturday I arrived, with a classmate, in Guatemala City and then took a four hour bus-ride to Guatemala's second largest city, Quetzaltenango, also known as Xela (pronounced Shay-la). We arrived in Xela after dark and found our way through the mostly un-labeled streets to a hotel we had reserved while we waited at the bus station in Guatemala City. We had eaten little on Saturday, arriving early in the morning from an overnight flight from Los Angeles and then waiting for seven hours at the bus station with few food options so we were famished by the time we got our hotel room. We decided to brave the dark streets in a country known for it's violence (in certain places) and were not disappointed by that decision. As we walked to a more central part of the city it began to rain and we found a small square with an adjacent cathedral which was filled with people celebrating Easter-vigil.

The square and the cathedral with overflow crowd in background.

After finding a food cart which would accept dollars, as we had run out of quetzals and there was no ATM nearby, we devoured a much-needed dinner.

The food stand where we got out of the rain and had some excellent dinner. I tried to take this one stealthily with my iPhone to avoid looking any more like a tourist than I already did.

As I looked around at the other people eating and those sitting in the pews for the overflow crowd coming out the doors of the cathedral I noticed that we were the only Gringos, which I took as a good sign as hopefully we will get a more authentic Latin American experience in a place that doesn't exist mainly to cater to tourists.

Contraption to heat water for the shower. Amazingly no one got electrocuted and if you turned the stream of water down low enough it actually got pretty hot.

On Easter morning we made our way back to the same square and got some coffee and tamales for breakfast. We had planned to worship in a Presbyterian church while in the city but after a short taxi ride were disappointed to find that church firmly locked.

The same square in the morning.

We walked back toward our hotel and went into the first "evangelical" church service we passed. Unfortunately it was a pretty extreme Prosperity "gospel" Word of Faith type of church. I hardly speak Spanish and even I could tell it was Word of Faith heresy but my friend who speaks a lot more Spanish was quite disgusted by the end of the sermon. I regretted not just having gone to one of the many Roman Catholic options we had passed by. Overall it was great to celebrate the Resurrection of our Lord here in Guatemala though. He is risen!

Random Update #6

1. I spent two weeks learning to read and also reading a multitude of EKGs, which are graphical representations of electric currents in the heart. If you've ever gone to the ER with chest pain, fainting or lightheadedness they should have performed an EKG on you by hooking a few wires up to your chest. It is amazing how much information we can get from this simple, non-invasive technology that's been around since the late 19th Century.

A classic right bundle branch block on EKG.

2. I finished Luther's The Bondage of the Will. It was an excellent book written by a passionate man and it has cemented for me a belief which I already held, that our salvation is all of grace, that is, monergistically given to us by God in Christ.

3. After finishing my EKG course I had two weeks without any class or rotation planned so I worked on a nephrology case report that I'm going to try to publish in a journal along with one of the nephrology fellows at Loma Linda.

4. At the beginning of those two weeks I decided I wanted to try to get through some great work of literature or theology. Three works which initially came to mind were Sailhamer's The Meaning of the Pentateuch, David Bentley Hart's The Beauty of the Infinite and St. Augustine's The City of God.

5. Augustine won out. It turns out that I won out too. The City of God is an amazing and excellent work, surpassing whatever expectations I had for it. I thought this book would be a difficult thing to trudge through, instead I have often been captivated by it, not wanting to put it down. Augustine deals masterfully with many questions of theology that I've had for many years, especially dealing with the rebellion of Satan and then our first parents in the Garden. I can see why the Reformers liked Augustine. Every argument he puts forward is very well argued from Scripture and he writes very logically. In his writing you can sense his great intelligence and also his great devotion to God which he would have ascribed only to God's grace in Christ and not to any good work on his part. I had considered reading The Meaning of the Pentateuch to be enlightened on those first five books of the Bible, but it turns out that in The City of God, Augustine provides a profound overview and commentary of the Old Testament. While I know that The Meaning of the Pentateuch is an excellent and probably enlightening book, I can't imagine it gives much more enlightenment on the Old Testament than does The City of God.

6. During my two weeks of freedom I went and saw some local sights I've wanted to check out for a while. I circumnavigated (in my car) the Salton Sea and I spent a day hiking on Santa Catalina Island off the coast of Los Angeles. I was very unimpressed by one of these outings while I was amazed by the beauty of the other. I'll make one or two blog posts out of these trips sometime soon.

7. For the past week I've been on an elective called Whole Person Care where we hang out with chaplains, shadow them in their visits with patients and then do our own visits where we attempt to talk about emotional and spiritual issues connected with patient's illnesses and hospitalizations. There is a required paper for the elective so I'm going to research PTSD and interview a VA chaplain about how to help patients with PTSD.

Nephro

As with many other times during the past three and a half years, the relative dearth of posts in the past week has been related to an increased level of busyness on my part. My busyness is secondary to the rotation I'm now on - Nephrology, medicine dealing with the kidneys. I was scheduled to be on this elective rotation for two weeks but I extended it to a month because I was learning a lot. A nephrologist I'm working with recently remarked that nephrology is the "final common pathway" of internal medicine patients. I think this remark has a lot of truth to it. It seems like almost every patient I've seen in internal medicine has some electrolyte or acid-base issue, all of which relate to the kidneys. If someone's potassium, sodium, chloride, magnesium, phosphorus, etc., etc., is too high or too low it almost invariably has something to do with their kidneys. If someone's blood is too acidic or too basic it often has to do with their kidneys. If someone can't hold onto their water so they have to drink all the time or if they can't get rid of extra water and they swell up - yep, the kidneys. This is one organ you don't want to screw up. But unfortunately some of the diseases that are becoming more and more common like diabetes and high blood pressure directly affect the kidneys and basically destroy them.

I chose this rotation because I know this is an area of weakness for me. The kidneys are extremely complex. During our second year of med school we had to memorize a much more complicated version of the schematic of a nephron below. Some of it is slowly coming back to me on this rotation.

As with many other parts of the body, when you look at them in detail you can't help but exclaim with the Psalmist that we are, "fearfully and wonderfully made (Ps 139:14a)."

ER

For the last two weeks I've been back in Loma Linda completing my required Emergency Medicine rotation of 4th year. It has been an interesting change of pace from the last 6 months which was filled with Internal Medicine and IM related fields. The pace of the first day in the ER was a bit of a jolt but it's been a good two weeks. I've seen quite a few interesting patients. The first patient I saw was a pretty classic presentation of acute appendicitis. CT confirmed the appy and he went to surgery that night. Some of the other stuff I've seen in the past two weeks includes...

1. Multiple fractures including a patient who had a complete transverse femur fracture.

2. Multiple patients with chest pain, none of whom were having a heart attack.

3. A patient without chest pain who was having a STEMI (heart attack.)

4. Parkinson's disease decompensation

5. A needle stick injury to a healthcare worker

6. Crohn's disease exacerbation

7. A kid with the flu

8. Cervicitis

9. A kid with an asthma attack

10. A kid with croup

11. DKA

12. A good number of patients with various pains without obvious diagnoses.

Out in the West Texas town of...

I arrived in El Paso, Texas today. I'll be spending the next month at Fort Bliss and William Beaumont Army Medical Center for Active Duty Training and a rotation in Infectious Disease. Ever since finding out I'd be spending some time in El Paso I've had this song stuck in my head off and on, so here you go...

Hulda Crooks

South of Loma Linda, California, where I'm in medical school there are miles and miles of trails in some dry, grassy hills. The hills are accessed at Hulda Crooks Park, named after a Seventh-day Adventist woman who was an avid mountaineer who climbed to the summit of Mt. Whitney, the tallest peak in the lower 48, at the age of 91. I've come to have a great appreciation for these hills and will often take my Bible, a water bottle and some granola bars up with me for some time in prayer and reading. I also like to take my camera up so here are some photos taken over a few months of hiking up in the Loma Linda South Hills.

Moonrise over Mt. San Bernardino, looking east. The city of Redlands in the foreground.

There are lots of interesting canyons in the hills. Looking north toward San Bernardino.

In Spring the hills briefly come alive with a lot of interesting plant life.

Lizards seem to be the predominant animal inhabiting the hills. They are very difficult to catch or get close enough to for a good photograph.

This year was very wet. Here is some dried-out mud with deep cracks in it at the bottom of what must have been a good-sized pond.

This plant was in the bottom of a dried-out creek bed. The flower is almost as large as the plant itself.

A honey bee in mid-flight.

A close up of the flower of a yucca, growing wild in the hills.

Looking south toward Riverside, a Coptic Church in the distance.

"Divine Appointment"

Some patient interactions make a strong impression on me. Sometimes it is because of an unusual diagnosis. But usually it's because I connect with a patient who is a Christian and is going through a very difficult time. Such an incident happened this week that I won't forget anytime soon.

I was just a few days into my internal medicine rotation, seeing patients in a clinic with an attending physician. Internal medicine is the field I'm interested in going into so I'm hoping I will like this rotation. The second or third patient of the day was called and entered the room. My first impression of the patient was that he was an elderly man who looked to be in a good physical state. He had no problem getting around and smiled widely as he shook my hand and the hand of the attending physician. As the doctor asked him why he had come to clinic that day it became obvious that this man had a very serious diagnosis, one with the potential to cause a lot of suffering and which had already caused a good deal of suffering in the days prior to his presentation to our clinic.

It turned out that this patient had gone to the ER with severe pain in one of his bones a few days earlier. In the ER they had ordered an X-ray and then a bone scan which revealed cancer that had metastasized to many different areas of this man's skeleton. Only in the last week had one of these metastases began to cause severe pain. The patient had been diagnosed with and treated for prostate cancer years earlier but the treatment had obviously been unsuccessful and now, barring a miracle, this man would most likely die from this cancer.

It struck me during the interview that this patient had a more severe diagnosis than any I had seen recently and he was also currently in a great deal of pain. But unlike many patients I see every week with less severe diagnoses he had a peace about him. He was friendly and smiled as he interacted with us.

At some point during the interview he mentioned, for some reason, that he had been a pastor. This piqued my curiosity but I thought that in the presence of my attending physician I would not get to explore this further. The fact that this man's diagnosis seemed so severe also made it difficult for me to consider talking about things not relating to that diagnosis. As the interview progressed the patient commented on how the hospital seemed very busy and it reminded him of when he had been a hospital chaplain in Kentucky. I mentioned that I had lived in Kentucky for a couple of years and the patient said, "I also went to seminary in Kentucky." Now he really had my attention and I said, "so did I, outside of Lexington." The patient still didn't expect that we shared any deeper connection and he said, "oh, I went to a small seminary called Asbury." I smiled and told him that I also went to Asbury. At this point I wasn't sure what the attending was thinking as I had just began working with her. But I was happy when she said she needed to step out for a moment and encouraged us to both keep reminiscing. And that we did.

We found that God had touched both of us at a wonderful place called Asbury Theological Seminary. We were far enough apart in age that we had shared none of the same professors but we had enough in common to enjoy talking of our memories of Asbury and Kentucky. When I asked what denomination he had pastored in he said "United Methodist," but quickly added that he had been one of the few conservative evangelicals in California. I could sympathize with him when he told me that it got so bad in the California-Pacific Annual Conference that he and the handful of other Bible-believing United Methodist pastors just quit going to annual conference. He told me that his family had finally left the United Methodist Church for a conservative, Bible-believing church. We were both encouraged by our conversation and with a big smile this elderly gentleman proclaimed that this was a "divine appointment." I agreed. I asked him if I could pray for him and just after I had started praying the attending walked into the room. We both straightened up but I hoped that I would be able to finish my prayer for him at some point.

The attending physician asked a few more questions, did a focused physical exam, and then formulated her plan to our patient. It looked like it would all be over soon when I was surprised to hear her ask, "is it alright if I pray for you?" The patient explained that I had already started praying earlier and said he would be happy if we all prayed together. So the three of us held hands and my attending prayed a wonderful Christ-focused prayer.

It was a great experience. And even though I grieve for what this man and his family might go through in the coming months, I'm thankful that he and his family know the Lord and have a hope of eternal life beholding, worshipping and knowing Him more and more. Seeing a patient with so much peace and even the ability to encourage those around him in the midst of pain and a potentially frightening diagnosis also made me think that this was evidence of God's grace in his life. I've seen many other patients with far less severe diagnoses who were angry, bitter and left the clinicians they met tired and cynical. But this man was a blessing to those he came in contact with. May God have mercy on him and his family.

City of Angels

They call Los Angeles the "City of Angels." I haven't found it to be that, exactly. On Monday morning I moved to Los Angeles, about 60 miles west of Loma Linda. For the next month I'll be living and working at the White Memorial Medical Center in East L.A., not far from downtown for my inpatient pediatric rotation. Posts may be sparse in the coming month unless some unforeseen inspiration seizes me.

The view of downtown Los Angeles from the Ellen G. White Memorial Medical Center at dusk.

Liberals do it too

I recently attended an interesting showing of a documentary film on the Loma Linda University campus called The Last Generation which exposes a new conservatism or "fundamentalism," as the documentary makers would have it, among Seventh-day Adventist youth. The documentary was well-made and interesting but as a non-Adventist I don't really have "a dog in that fight." Even so it was interesting to be in a packed auditorium in the new Centennial Complex filled mostly with Adventists on a sabbath-afternoon. After the showing there were some strong feelings expressed during a Q and A session. Both liberals and conservatives expressed their opinions on the film. Even though I would disagree with both sides on some important theological matters, I certainly resonated more emotionally with the conservatives.

At one point a more liberal questioner posed a question to the panel which included the film-makers and some Loma Linda and outside professors. The questioner basically said something like, "is it possible to have dialogue with these fundamentalists when they might not even think you're a Christian at best or that you are a tool of the devil at worst." I was surprised by the wise answer which was given by one of the panel professors. This professor, who I think was more liberal-leaning, said something to the effect that while conservatives may say those things and that this can shut down dialogue, liberals do exactly the same thing when they question the intelligence or sanity of conservatives.

I thought this was an excellent point. I don't lift up the value of endless "dialogue" anywhere near as much as a lot of people do but I think it was interesting to point out that liberals are just as guilty of shutting down dialogue as conservatives, they just do it differently and in a way which seems more acceptable to many people.

Quake Swarm

Last Saturday I went hiking in the Loma Linda Hills just south of the city. Around one o'clock I was sitting on a hill reading, when the earth began to shake. I've always thought I would feel safer out in the open during an earthquake but even being up on a hill could be a frightening experience. The entire hill felt like Jell-O and it seemed that if the hill shook much harder the whole thing could disintegrate. It turns out that Saturday's quake was 4.1 on the Richter scale. The earthquake on Saturday would be the beginning of a week of almost daily temblors. Today was the most extreme day yet with three earthquakes in a row, each above 3.0, just before noon. Southern California is known for its earthquakes but during the last week I've felt as many as I have in the last two and a half years of med school.

They're calling this current spate of earthquakes an "earthquake swarm" and you can get a nice visual of the "swarm" on the map I copied from here below. In the map you can see the city of Loma Linda where I live and go to school and the swarm of earthquakes off to the southeast:

Yellow circles indicate earthquakes from the past week, blue circles from the past day and the red circle is an earthquake which had occurred in the preceding hour. The bigger the circle, the stronger the earthquake. The majority of these quakes are "micro-earthquakes" and can't be felt but a good number of them have been big enough to shake things up a bit.

So that's what that was...

One of the cool things about medical school is that from time to time I'll stumble upon an explanation of some illness or physical complaint either that I've suffered or someone else I knew experienced. This happened today.

When I was a kid I was somewhat of a hypochondriac. I made my mom take me to the doctor for all kinds of insignificant complaints. It was dangerous when in elementary school I got my hands on some "home health guidebook," started reading about all the diseases and then convinced myself that maybe I was dying of some rare cancer or something like that. In our own day people will go on WebMD or some similar website and do the same thing.

But one time, I would guess I was probably about 10 years old, I had a frightening experience which was very real. I was just playing around or something, and suddenly experienced a severe, sharp pain in my chest. The pain came on with inspiration, lasted a few seconds, and then went away quickly. For some reason we owned a stethoscope which I went and grabbed and listened to my now very fast heart rate as I was panicking, being convinced that I was having a heart attack at the age of 10. I went to my mom and demanded to go to the hospital and she did take me to an urgent care clinic. I remember the doctor seeming quite unimpressed and giving me a lecture about how I can't freak out about every unexplained pain here or there. I must have been relieved though by the doctor's lack of concern as I can't remember worrying too much about childhood-onset heart disease in subsequent years.

Today as I was studying for my pediatric rotation I came across a question which basically asked, "what is the most common cause of chest pain in an adolescent?" I thought the answer was costochondritis, an inflammation of the cartilage between the ribs and sternum. But I was incorrect. The most common cause of chest pain in an adolescent is precordial catch syndrome also known as Texidor's twinge. I quickly wikipediad precordial catch and this syndrome described to a t what I experienced as a kid - even the panic about fear of having a heart attack. The cause is unknown although it has been suggested that it originates in the parietal pleura of the lungs. As I expected, the syndrome is completely benign. I'm always happy to make sense of some unexplained childhood incident as happened today.

First Call

I'm a night-owl. I like to stay up late. But I also like to sleep. The last time I fasted completely from sleep was eight years ago during a night of insomnia. Other than that I remember once when I was a kid I decided to stay up all night with a friend to see what it was like. I wasn't impressed.

But Friday night/Saturday morning became the third time in my life I went for 24 hours without sleep. It was my first real "on-call" experience in medicine, on my surgery rotation for my 3rd year of med school. The day started at 6AM Friday morning and ended at 10:30 AM Saturday morning, with 20 of those 28 hours spent working in the hospital. I spent the eventful evening running between the ER and the operating room as we saw a shreded leg from a motorcycle accident and point blank shotgun blast to an abdomen, among other things.

At around 4AM as I stood over an operating table, holding a retractor (a rather unimportant job), I was fading with my eyes attempting to force themselves closed. But I became aware of the importance of the circadian rhythm as 6AM rolled around and I began to feel as good and as wide awake as I do most mornings. This was a pleasant surprise. After rounding on our team's patients I headed back to Loma Linda for a much-needed nap.

You may have noticed fewer posts on this blog in the past week. It is likely to remain that way for the next five weeks as general surgery is a very busy rotation. I will put this teaser out there though... I'm thinking of writing a post entitled "Lapin Maija."

Not a good luck charm

With the start of my third year of medical school I've been shocked into a schedule quite foreign to me, waking up at four or five in the morning to make it to the hospital to see patients and have charts ready for interns and residents by six or seven. In the last week or so I've gotten in the habit of reading a chapter from the Old Testament with my coffee and oatmeal before heading to the hospital. I've made it through the OT before but in recent years I've neglected it a bit, spending most of my time in the Gospels and also a good amount of time in the rest of the NT in my regular devotional reading.

There are a lot of things in the Old Testament I wouldn't claim to have a good understanding of. This is certainly not the fault of one of my favorite professors at Asbury Theological Seminary, Dr. Lawson Stone, who taught a wonderful Old Testament survey class when I was there. I think the Old Testament is generally harder to understand than the New Testament and one area which has always been difficult for me is dealing with the ark of the covenant. It had bothered me that at times it seemed like the Israelites treated it as a good luck charm. And it almost seems that that was how it worked sometimes, as with Obed-edom in 2nd Samuel 6:10-11 where the Lord blesses Obed-edom, seemingly as a result of having the Ark under his roof.

During my mornings I've been reading through 2nd Samuel and recently read through chapter fifteen. Here David is fleeing from Jerusalem as Absalom prepares to take the kingdom from his father. As David is fleeing Jerusalem, the priests and Levites come to David bearing the ark of the covenant. But David tells Zadok, the priest, to, "Carry the ark of God back into the city. If I find favor in the eyes of the Lord, he will bring me back and let me see both it and his dwelling place. But if he says, 'I have no pleasure in you,' behold, here I am, let him do to me what seems good to him (2nd Samuel 15:25-26)." I'll admit that I had forgotten this passage and when I read that the priests had carried out the ark I figured that David would want to take it with him. But the first thought I had at David's words was that he did not view the ark as a good luck charm. I must be in good company with that assessment because I checked the text note in my ESV Study Bible right away and it read, "David does not try to use the ark as some sort of 'good luck charm.'" Instead David's attitude seems to be completely trusting in God's sovereignty, with or without the ark. David doesn't seem to think that the outcome of Absalom's rebellion will come about by chance or that having the ark will somehow increase his chances of success. David sees his return to Jerusalem as completely dependent upon the will of the Lord and nothing else. This one occasion certainly doesn't undo all of my lack of understanding in this area but I think David's perspective is very interesting here and I think it also reflects the perspective we should have as Christians on the grace of God. That is, we can't earn it and we can't manipulate God in any way to get it. How God bestows grace is completely dependent on his sovereign will and not dependent on anything we could be or do.

Freedom!

Well, it's over. I took the test, probably the biggest of my life so far. I was thankful that my parents agreed to drive me down to the testing center in Portland, giving me some last minute studying time. I even got one question right as a result of that time on the drive down. The test itself didn't seem too bad, other than the length - 336 questions, most of which were vignettes of patients with one mystery disease or another. I used a program called USMLE World which has thousands of practice questions with good explanations for the correct answers. Out of any step 1 prep I did, the USMLE World questions were the best. I tried to make a habit of listening to sermons after studying all day most days for the last few weeks. I've become a big fan of Paul Washer lately and some of the best sermons I listened to last week were of Washer preaching on the Song of Songs. I'm headed up to Vancouver Island in Canada tomorrow morning for a backpacking trip on Nootka Island. Expect some pictures next weekend.

Random Update #4

The last few weeks have been a sort of blogging hiatus for me as I've put most of my time and energy into preparing for the Step 1 USMLE, otherwise known as the medical board exam. Many would say that this is the single most important test that a future physician will ever take. This test does a lot to determine a medical student's competitiveness for various residencies after med school. I'm taking the test on June 20th in Portland, Ore., and I'm attempting to spend 8-10 hours studying each day up until then. I'm very happy to be back in Battle Ground, Washington where I've mostly been hanging out at a local coffee shop to study.

One of the big events during my "break" this year was the wedding of one of my best friends. My friend Josh and his bride, Lacie, tied the knot at Vancouver Apostolic Lutheran Church on Saturday. I was honored to be a groomsman in the wedding which was the best I had ever been to. The wedding was very focused on how the marital covenant finds its definition in Scripture and the officiant gave a short message where the traditional, Scriptural view of the complimentary roles of the man and woman in marriage were presented. He also talked about the way in which the marriage relationship reflects the relationship between Christ and the Church. But above the message and the presence of friends, it was the powerful and blessed presence of the Holy Spirit which truly made this wedding a wonderful experience.

He Shall Bruise Your Head

I went for a hike in the Loma Linda hills Monday when I noticed a sound I hadn't heard before just off of the path. I was surprised to see a large rattle snake, about 6 feet long, a couple of feet from me. I know he's a little hard to make out in the picture but if you can imagine him being about 6 feet long you can imagine that he was quite impressive.

I was going to call this blog post "rattle snake" or something boring like that. But in close proximity to Good Friday and Easter I decided to refer to what many believe is the first messianic prophecy in the Bible where God curses the serpent shortly after the fall. In Genesis 3:15 God is speaking to the snake and says, "I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and her offspring; he shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel."

She's a beaut'

I recently acquired this ping-pong table. It will provide many a med-student with many an hour of procrastination.