Mammoth/Job/Irenaeus/Pascal

I know that my redeemer lives

-Job

To inaugurate what may be the last real Christmas Break of my life I headed up with some friends to Mammoth Mountain for a weekend of snowboarding. Mammoth is high in the Sierra Nevada in central California and is the most impressive ski resort I've ever seen. We got a good deal on a slopeside condo and our plan was to snowboard all day Saturday and Sunday. Four-and-a-half hours north of Loma Linda we drove into heavily falling snow in Mammoth Lakes, California as we arrived at the condo. The next morning we arose early to be the first on the lift to snowboard down untracked powder. The chest-deep powder was a challenge that morning but as the runs became more tracked-out and I adapted to the powder the day turned into an excellent day of snowboarding. The snow did not quit falling that day and fell all night Saturday night. When we headed up the slopes again Sunday morning we found that only two of the twenty-eight lifts were open because of wind and snow. It turns out that the storm we weathered in Mammoth has been part of the snowiest December ever recorded there (since record-keeping was started in 1969.) Between Friday and Sunday when we left the storm dumped 6 to 10 feet of snow.

I forgot my camera but snapped a few photos on the way out of town with my iPhone:

Some skiers make their way to the lift.

The road out of town, speed limit sign on right.

Digging one of our cars out of the snow.

After a full day of snowboarding Saturday we gathered, a group of 10, for a time of devotion, focusing on Old Testament prophecies concerning the incarnation, life and atoning death of Jesus Christ. We also read the Christmas story from Matthew and Luke. Some of the prophecies we read and meditated on were very familiar to me such as that from Genesis 3:15, ". . . he shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel," and those from Isaiah and Micah. But I had not realized that the Book of Job also contains some words which seem to be Messianic in character. And certainly commentators such as Wesley and Matthew Henry saw some of these words as directly prophetic concerning Christ. It was Job 9:32-35 which especially affected me. In this section Job expresses his desire for an Arbiter between him and the holy and seemingly unapproachable God of the universe. As Job expresses his desire he says, "There is no arbiter between us, who might lay his hand on us both (9:33)." Job confesses his need for an Arbiter between himself and God, the need of every sinner. But Job does not stop here. In 16:19 he confesses his hope that he does indeed have a "witness" in heaven, "Even now, behold, my witness is in heaven, and he who testifies for me is on high." In this verse Job seems to fit with the Old Testament saints mentioned in Hebrews 11 where the author of that book writes, "These all died in faith, not having received the things promised, but having seen them and greeted them from afar, and having acknowledged that they were strangers and exiles on the earth (11:13)." Therefore, from afar, Job sees and greets the One who is his Arbiter and Witness in Heaven, the Lord Jesus Christ, who is the "one mediator between God and men (1 Tim 2:5)." Later, in a statement that in my opinion points to Christ's incarnation and Job's eventual resurrection, (although the text note in my ESV Study Bible doesn't jump to that conclusion as it says, "Because of Job's earlier laments and the difficulty of the Hebrew in v. 26, interpreters have questioned the likelihood that Job is expressing in these verses a belief that God will redeem him after death."), Job wonderfully proclaims, "For I know that my Redeemer lives, and at the last will stand upon the earth. And after my skin has been thus destroyed, yet in my flesh I shall see God, whom I shall see for myself, and my eyes shall behold, and not another (Job 19:25-27a)." Job knew that he would, in the flesh, see his Redeemer, the One who said, "Whoever has seen me has seen the Father (John 14:9b)."

Job's desire for an Arbiter between himself and God, one who could, "lay his hand on us both," reminded me of something I had just read from St. Irenaeus last week. He wrote, concerning Christ:

[In this way] He attached and united man to God. Had man not vanquished the enemy of man, the enemy would not have been justly vanquished. On the other hand, had it not been God who granted salvation, we could never have possessed it securely. And if man had not been united to God, he could never have become a partaker of incorruptibility. It required the Mediator of God and men, through His kinship with both, to bring back both to friendship and concord, presenting man to God, revealing God to man.

During Advent as we prepare to celebrate the Incarnation of our Lord and also look forward to His glorious Parousia, it is good to be reminded of the necessity of God the Son becoming fully and truly man to redeem sinners. Christ's Incarnation was not some arbitrary choice of God in determining how He would save sinners but it was necessary and the only fitting manner in which God would accomplish His sovereign purpose.

When I arrived back in Loma Linda I opened my copy of Pascal's Pensées, which I had recently purchased and came across a quote which fit very well with our recent devotional time focusing on the prophecies concerning Christ. Pascal wrote:

If a single man had written a book foretelling the time and manner of Jesus' coming and Jesus had come in comformity with these prophecies, this would carry infinite weight.

But there is much more here. There is a succession of men over a period of 4,000 years, coming consistently and invariably one after the other, to foretell the same coming; there is an entire people proclaiming it, existing for 4,000 years to testify in a body to the certainty they feel about it, from which they cannot be deflected by whatever threats and persecutions they may suffer. This is of a quite different order of importance.

He giveth snow like wool

Lacking inspiration to write about anything else at the moment I’ll reflect on this year’s snowboarding, a sport I’ve grown to love more each year for the last five or six years. Prior to that time, from when I was 12 or 13 years old, I was a skier and would usually go up a couple of times a year. I did more snowboarding this year than any previous year.

This year’s snowboarding started with my Christmas break when I went home to Southwest Washington state. I snowboarded Mt. Hood at Ski Bowl and Mt. Hood Meadows with my younger brothers and various friends:

Looking up at Mt. Hood at dusk from Ski Bowl.

Lots of powder on the upper runs at Ski Bowl at night.

Sunset from Mt. Hood Meadows

Unfortunately I have no pictures but I also spent a rainy New Year’s Eve and early New Year’s Day on Mt. Hood with a brother and a friend. We snowboarded in the sometimes pouring rain which was a new experience for me. We made a fun time of it though trying to hone our jumping skills and enjoying the firework show at midnight on the mountain.

When I returned to California I made three trips up to Snow Valley near Big Bear in the mountains north of Loma Linda and the Inland Empire. The mountains in Southern California got more snow this year than in a long time so the snowboarding has been better than usual down here this year.

Mountains of fresh snow in a gas station parking lot as we made our way to Snow Valley.

To cap off the year’s snowboarding I made a trip up to Mammoth Mountain a couple of weeks ago. We left Loma Linda at 3AM, made it to Mammoth in time for the lifts to open, left at 4PM when the lifts closed and were back home in Loma Linda around 9:30.

Top of the Sierra, Mammoth Mountain

Mammoth - Best Weekend of Med School

This weekend, after a set of midterm exams, I headed, with four classmates, to Mammoth Mountain ski resort about six hours north of where I go to school in Loma Linda. In Mammoth Lakes we met a sixth person with whom we would snowboard. I enjoyed two amazing days of the best snowboarding I've ever experienced. Some of the friends I went with are very good boarders so they pushed me to the limits of my abilities. The conditions in Mammoth were better than anything I've seen in the three years I've been snowboarding with lots of fresh powder. All who went were also strong Christians so on the way up to Mammoth and on the way back home we listened to John Piper sermons which were also very good. Here are some pictures:

Meet the new board

Well, I finally broke down and bought a snowboard. This after three years of renting whenever I went. Before that I skied for a good number of years but I finally caved into peer pressure and took up snowboarding. I got to test out my new board last weekend at Mountain High ski resort in the San Gabriel mountains north of L.A. The snow was fake and icy but I have to say that I'm quite pleased with my purchase. I liked the feel of this board better than anything else I've used so far. I'm looking forward to trying it out in some real snow in a few weeks when I go with some of my classmates up to Mammoth. Hopefully someday I'll be able to try it out back in my native country on Mt. Hood.

Of Physician-Assisted Suicide and Snowboarding

Last weekend was for me an eventful one. I had my interview with the University of Washington School of Medicine on Friday and went snowboarding for the first time on Saturday. My dad and I drove up to Seattle on Friday for the interview. I had slept very little the night before thanks to anxiety about the interview so I was very thankful for my dad's willingness to make the three and a half hour drive. The interview itself seemed short to me and I don't have a strong sense of how it went. I was interviewed by a panel of three, two professors and a current student. They asked me how I thought my seminary experience might help as a doctor and about why I felt drawn to medicine. One of the more difficult questions was, "If you like helping people then why don't you just become a social worker?" I struggled to answer this well but in the end I focused on my love for biology and chemistry which I thought suited me more for medicine. The most difficult question though was dealing with physician-assisted suicide. The question was posed to me like this: "You are a doctor and you have a patient with terminal cancer. She is in a lot of pain and has at the most a month or two to live. She has decided that it would be better to just end it now. She asks you how many of her pain pills she would have to take to kill herself. What do you do?" It wasn't fun dealing with that. In the end I said that ethically I couldn't help someone end their life. It made me feel a little better when my interviewer said that most doctors would probably answer the same way I had. After a brief discussion on socialized healthcare and a time for me to ask them questions the interview was over. I hope it went well as UW is my first choice among the schools I applied to.

On Saturday I went snowboarding for the first time. I've done quite a bit of skiing but had held off on snowboarding until now. I had met a guy who was in the church youth group I led for two and a half years at my parent's very re-appraising UMC at the Christmas Eve service I attended. I've desired to keep in touch with the youth I discipled as most of them are not in situations where they are hearing the gospel. I asked this youth if he'd be interested in going up to the mountain and he was very excited at the prospect so I had been praying since then that God would let it happen. So we ended up going on Saturday with a couple of other friends who go to the same pentecostal church I've been going to while I've been home over the break. I picked snowboarding up pretty quickly. We had some good conversations about God and I believe the youth was ministered to. Overall.....a great weekend.