New Year. In 2015, I went through what was pretty easily the most difficult year of my life (2014 might have been a contender before that), so it only makes sense that 2016 would try to top it. It's becoming more and more difficult to say that the arduous nature of these experiences should always be crafting me into something better.
Backpacking through Europe was difficult but purposeful; despite this, there remained an uneasy change in the way I thought about God as a result. My first year of medical school brought me through a rewiring of my brain, then failure with the depression that followed (along with the prospect of more island imprisonment) and less comradery with classmates because those classmates changed.
I was surrounded by people with different customs, ideas, morals, and behaviors. People who were willing to talk about things that I'd never thought it appropriate to talk about, yet with that came an openness that made me more comfortable with peoples and groups which I hadn't previously been comfortable.
So I adapted, I changed, I renewed, and though my relationship with God surely faltered due to lack of discipline in prayer and a deficit in Christian community, I was consistent in studying the Bible and watching a weekly sermon.
And then I made it back home.
Home. Texas. The place that my medical psychology professor had mocked for the beliefs of its populace. And he was quite justified in doing so. Here is a place where, for the most part, science and faith are forced to meet in pitched battle rather than in a friendly wrestling bout. Here is where a thing is true until proven false, rather than the truth verified by facts. Conspiracy theories predominate while accepted science is ridiculed. Believe differently? Well, you are both a fool and a man lacking in faith.
And the election, of course...
No comments:
Post a Comment