the things you learn as an M1

There's an article out in there in the depths of the interwebs about the 100 things you learn as an M1. Pardon some of the strong language on it...I didn't write it.

Well anyway, not all of them apply to me, so I thought I'd make a list of the ones that do! Here we go...

1. You'll develop strange study habits--like talking out loud to yourself, or repeating stupid mnemonics every time you have to recall a certain piece of information. Honestly, most of my mnemonics are inappropriate for this setting, but it does help you to remember them!
2. You will more than once find yourself at a table with a laptop, an iPad, two textbooks and several pages of notes all open in front of you and you will question your existence. I can't even tell you how many days of my life this is true. 
3. Don't study the night after an exam. Only gunners start studying the night after the exam.
4. Study a little bit every weekend. Not just exam weekends. 
5. Stop trying to get through the end of the week--just get through tomorrow. I struggle with this one. I'm too much of a planner, but you'll kill yourself if you plan to the end of the week! 
6. Learn to ignore the internet for a couple of hours at a time. Yeah...I'm terrible at this one...
7. Don't be a gunner, don't ask other people about their grades, don't volunteer information about yours either.
8. Don't ask questions in class just to look smart.
9. Never wear your anatomy scrubs outside of the lab. Disgusting. No thanks. 
10. You will learn how to deal with being in the anatomy lab alone late at night or early in the morning. It will no longer be creepy to you to be the only living person in a room with 30 bodies. 
11. You will lose the ability to remember to get your oil changed on time, remember your mother's birthday, or even remember what day of the week it is, but you can name all the interleukens or all the anti-arrhythmic drugs--this is more important. I once couldn't remember what a hubcap was called. I called it the "pretty shiny part of the tire" when I was getting a flat taken care of. The tire shop guy thought I was a complete idiot. 
12. "Because I don't have space in my brain" will become a valid excuse for everything from reasons you didn't call a guy back to reasons you forgot to buy bread at the store. 
13. You'll finally understand what it meant when other people said "people outside of medical school just won't get it."
14. Medical shows on TV will be aggravating because you know just enough to know that they're doing it wrong. Nahh, I'm not super aggravated about it. But Grey's Anatomy characters often put their stethoscopes in upside down! 
15. You will more than once end up with nothing left in your fridge except bread, peanut butter, and condiments. Usually I don't even have bread. 
16. You become terrified of ever having children because you know the size of a baby's skull in comparison to a female pelvis, and the long long long list of possible birth defects. And not to mention all of the diseases pregnancy is a risk factor for. 
17. TAKE THE SUMMER OFF before you start medical school. Enjoy the last bits of freedom. And the summer between M1 and M2 years!
18. Sometimes you will laugh because there's nothing else to do. Sometimes you will cry because there's nothing else to do. I do a lot of both. 
19. You will, at least once, have a break down where you're not sure why you're in medical school. You will get past it. I also have lots of those. 
20. You will have good days and bad days. The good moments (I'm not even sure if you can qualify them as days sometimes) make the bad days worth it! 
21. You will start the year going to every social event, but by the end of first year you would rather spend a Friday night alone in bed with trashy television than out with friends at a bar. I didn't really even start the year off very social. But now I'm definitely all about being in bed early watching Netflix. 
22. You will realize that whenever a small group of people are in a high stress situation it's just like high school all over again--if you're smart you will stay out of the drama. 
23. You will, more than once, have awkward conversations with the non-med school friends you have, or your family members in which you mention that you held a (insert random organ here) today. I talk about body fluids more than the normal person should. 
24. You will be asked by someone not in medical school if your life is like Grey's Anatomy/House/ER/any other popular medical show. No. It's not. There's a reason that they aren't making shows about medical school. Internship/residency and being an attending are far more exciting for television purposes. If you videoed my life, there would be lots of sleeping, eating and studying. 
25. Make time for your family, significant other, or the friends you want to hang on to. They will keep you sane!
26. You'll learn to be okay with saying "I don't know" when attendings ask you questions.
27. You will get pimped. Luckily most attendings know you're still an MS1 and that you're stupid. 
28. Learn to let go of your fear of imperfection--you will make mistakes.
29. You'll finally realize that you can't learn EVERYTHING--this isn't undergrad anymore. There's so much left to learn! 
30. You'll learn to compete with yourself and yourself only.
31. Laugh at yourself. Laugh because it's better than crying.
32. Life happens. Sometimes someone needs you, or you fall in love, or you get sick and fall apart. Push through those times and take the time you need. 
33. You're not alone. Everyone struggles. Most importantly, there are tons of people around to support you whenever you're struggling.

There's still more to learn! But I think I'll learn it from this 3-year-old. This video series is absolutely hilarious. And this particular one doesn't let down at all!

8 reasons you should be dating a female doc

Hello all! Something moderately funny. You'll have to ask Mr. Justin if any of these things are true! You can find the original article here. For those of you who won't click the hyperlink... here's the list! (I'd suggest reading the real link though...much funnier than mine!)

1. We know CPR. My knowledge of CPR has thankfully never been put to the real-life scenario test. One of my friends gave her dad the Heimlich over Christmas break when he was choking though. 
2. We understand hard work. It's no secret (hopefully) that med school is hard. Someone's gotta do it though!
3. We handle stress well and multi-task like pros. Let's not ask my parents about how I handle stress; I don't think they would qualify it as "well". However, I am quite proficient at listening to lectures and also looking at Pinterest. 
4. We are financially viable. Jokes on you, I don't have any money right now. Maybe I will in the future. But I don't really care who brings home the bacon...mostly because I'm not about to eat bacon. 
5. We are smart. Again, please don't ask my parents about this one. Actually maybe don't ask anyone that I've ever interacted with either...
6. We have good personalities. People seem to like me! Sometimes I wonder if it's just because I am small and they get me confused with a small animal of some sort. 
7. We tend to be low maintenance.  (no comment.)
8. We have a unique perspective on life. My current perspective is of how un-fun it is to spend a million hours looking at and re-writing notes. I hear that when you get to see patients though, it's pretty darn awesome. Perhaps someday that day will come for me! Until then...I have a test Wednesday and one next week too! 

Happy Monday! Have a wonderful week! 

the view from your seat.

Recently I read a really powerful and hopeful post from a wonderful friend/colleague/mentor/fellow sushi lover. It's so good that I've just quoted the whole thing below for you.

It's not surprise that the Church is broken (I'm personally feeling this one right now), but yet, incredible things are still coming out of the Church. Young people in age and in spirit are still flocking to the Church because the Gospel has transformed them. 

My seat in the auditorium has seen both highs and lows in the past few years, but I for one am hopeful for the new view I will see in the coming years! 

Rev. Dr. Adam White
Campus Pastor
The Lutheran Center
University of Nebraska-Lincoln

Dear Sisters and Brothers in Christ:

I wish that you could see what I see.

The past few months I’ve been thinking about perspective. Perspective is such an important thing. It determines how we see everything around us. We might like to think that we can step back and view things from some objective standpoint, but the truth is our vision is always limited by where we’re standing and what we’re expecting – we see things dimly, as Paul put it, because we are finite (1 Corinthians 13:12).

Kenda Creasy Dean once put it this way, “We see Christ differently based upon where we sit in the human auditorium.” She continues, “[S]o no matter what I do to translate Christ to my children, they will always encounter him differently.”

The same could be said of the Church: We see the Church differently based upon where we sit in the human auditorium.

Where we sit in the auditorium matters. This reminds us that the Church is always in the process of translation – of inviting others to see things from different perspectives, and creating language that does the work we need it to do.

And this matters because taking the fact of perspective seriously means being open to the reality that even when we are doing our best to follow Christ, we will, at times, see things quite differently. This means that the Gospel is always particularized and concretized – that we encounter it where we are, not in some privileged position where we can see the whole as it is rather than, as I perceive it. Generalization of one’s (or one congregation’s) perspective to the level of the whole picture is akin to looking at a toe on the Body of Christ and absurdly asserting, “This is the whole body.”

Still this is a game too often played with denominations like ours. When we don’t like things from our perspective, we point to a part of the body we think is ugly or malformed and we suggest that it’s the whole thing, the entire denomination, and that we’d be better off if we weren’t joined with a body that’s just an enormous, fungus infested, crooked toe. In acting in this manner we misperceive in two important ways: first, we fail to see the body in its rich diversity, and second, we fail to see the ubiquity of the Church’s brokenness. (i.e. If we focus on the illness of another part of the body we often forget that we are ill, too.) As Paul reminds us, all have sinned and fall short.

If I’m honest about this issue, I’ve been thinking about this largely because when I was most recently serving in a parish, perception created a powerful frame for seeing the larger church. The way that we talked about the larger church was given a particular shape by the convictions, attitudes and biases of those in leadership (including me). Everything the larger Church (Synod, ELCA, etc.) did was interpreted in light of particular assumptions about the nature of things. It was easy to misrepresent things in this context, and increasingly this perspective became something of a dark, dismal view of the ELCA that shaded virtually everything.

This frame of reference was deeply powerful and, at times, persuasive. It generated its own canon of credible sources (in an internet and cable-news age this is far too easy), and it provided me and other members of the community a way to make sense of things happening around us. It gave us a potent story to make meaning out of our experiences.

I do not wish to indict this particular story now or those who have told it. I even believe that this story—and the way of seeing it encourages—has been told out of a deep desire to be truthful and to have integrity. So I have a more modest aim. I simply want to suggest that where we sit in the auditorium matters.

I want to make this suggestion because I have a fairly new seat in the scheme of things. I just finished my third year on campus and what I see is not dark or dismal. It’s quite the contrary. What I see is hopeful. Good.

And the truth is, my view is much broader than it used to be because I work with students from multiple congregations who are being raised—and raised well—in the Christian faith. I can list youth directors and Christian educators who are doing marvelous things in faith formation, people who get it. I see the very realfruits of their labor every day. I travel to congregations who are proclaiming the grace and love of Jesus Christ with boldness, who have looked outside their own interests to serve those on the margins as Christ calls us to do. I have had the experience of working with a Synod office that is deeply concerned with the life and the vitality of the Lutheran form of Christian witness, a Synod that has inspiring vision for what it means to be the Lutheran Church in the 21st Century.

I see congregations, denominations and educational institutions working together so that mutual ministry happens even in financially challenging times – risking for one another. And it’s beautiful.

Somehow I have been blessed with a box seat from which to view the stage of the ELCA and, I have to tell you, I love the view. Really. From where I’m sitting, I see a church that is first and foremost interested in proclaiming Jesus Christ and raising up disciples to bear witness to this good news in the world. Yes, anEvangelical Lutheran Church.

For a little perspective, last spring, I sat with the Bishop of the Nebraska Synod of the ELCA and fifteen college students, from across our Synod, denomination, and beyond, who in one form or another are discerning calls to ministry in the church of Jesus Christ. I had the best seat in the house.

The bishop asked them, “What are you here in spite of?” In essence he asked them, “What parts of the body are so ugly that they almost kept you away from this table?” And invariably they had some nasty big toes to name:

“I felt like my church had been lying to me the whole time.”

“My church didn’t teach me how to pray.”

“My church put expectations on me that were not consistent with who I discerned God was calling me to be.”

This is but a sample of the many responses. There were ways, real ways, that the Church had wronged young people. There were ugly big toes to be sure that could have easily been blown out of proportion. These students had not experienced a pure and perfect church – far from it.

But somehow these students had caught sight of something bigger. Right alongside those admissions of the Church’s sin and brokenness the students also told stories of mentors, and Sunday school teachers, and sermons that stirred something in their hearts. In the broken mess of a sinner and saint congregation they heard the Word of God proclaimed and found themselves becoming part of the body of Christ they consumed at the Lord’s Table. Somehow from where they were seated “in the human auditorium,” the story of the Gospel grasped them, the story of God entering into our particularities, meeting us where we are, and dying for us while we were still sinners – a story so BIG that it had to be captured by at least four different writers from four different perspectives who didn’t agree on all the details. Somehow this Gospel story relativized the students’ perspectives and transformed them…

It’s always amazing to me when the gospel takes hold. It’s nothing short of miraculous when the Word causes us to see something beyond the genuine ugliness of our experiences of the Church.

I suppose in this light it’s not at all surprising that in Luke’s gospel when the women return from the empty tomb and tell the other disciples what they had seen that the disciples thought it was nonsense. From those disciples’ perspective, their leader is dead, crucified, and the empty-tomb story that the women told can only be a cruel joke. For many of the disciples, it would have been hard to not write off the whole Jesus experience as something gone wrong, something distorted and ugly.

That’s why in response to the women telling them that the tomb was empty, the other disciples call, “lerios”, a Greek word that Anna Carter Florence has argued is best translated, “’drivel’, ‘trash’, ‘garbage’, ‘crap’, ‘bull’ or in its more vulgar form ‘&^%^*%(@!’.”

To the witness of the women, to their testimony of a better reality, the others call lerios in unison.

That’s the power of perspective. It’s easy for those who see only big toes to call lerios when they hear about something good going on in the church, when they hear that reality of things is more hopeful than they could possibly imagine.

But Peter is the one who moves on despite his horrible experience. He’s the one that has faith in-spite-of. He has to see for himself before he writes off the women’s story for good, and when he changes “his seat in the auditorium,” everything looks very, very different. Peter discovers a God is still at work right in the middle of human brokenness, even amidst suffering and death.

Don’t get me wrong; there are ugly big toes, fingers, armpits, and even open festering sores in any denomination. In the ELCA there are things we do very poorly. There are practices we have that are suspect. Sometimes our priorities seem entirely misguided. Still, more importantly, I also know full well that however good my seat is, it’s still only my seat.

Still, where your seat is in the auditorium matters. I know this is a radical suggestion in a tradition where many like to sit in the same place week after week after week after week. But for those of you out there who have a small frame of reference, I’d encourage you to change your seat. Take a look around. See what things look like from a different angle. Quit thinking that your perspective is right over and against all the others. Get a broader view. Talk to those who are telling a different story about what’s going on. And don’t be so sure that anything good you hear is lerios. It’s really interesting what you might discover.

I wish that you could see what I see. I really do.

Today I became an orphan.

Today my home church officially voted to leave the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America (ELCA) and become a member congregation in another denomination. The details of why they left or where they moved are currently unimportant.

The abandonment I feel seems to me to be the more important matter. 

I feel like a plastic bag blowing in the wind. I no longer have a church home to claim.** My root system has been ripped out from under me (quite violently it feels, I might add). That place has seen some of my favorite moments. I was baptized there (admittedly, I don't remember this...I'm sure it was lovely though), took my first communion, was confirmed, attended youth group, was on staff there for two years, and partnered with them as the home congregation for the campus ministry program of which I was in charge. I volunteered at VBS for several years. Was involved in choir and praise team. Served on several committees. Traveled to mission trips and ski trips both domestically and abroad as a student and a sponsor. 

FSP was formative for me. They taught me to pray. They taught me to praise. It seems they are also teaching me to mourn and lament. 

I keep hearing from those that are moving with the church that they are not abandoning anyone. But that's not how I feel. I feel like an orphan. I have not felt exceptionally welcome in that building for years. I wasn't even invited to the vote today, although I am a voting member of the congregation. 

I know that I'm not the only one to feel this way either. 

Although I am truly saddened to say goodbye to a place that I called home for many years, I am happy that a definitive decision has finally been reached. It has been a very long, very trying process with many people wounded along the way. I pray that this decision is a healthy one for the congregants that are moving to the denomination. And I pray that the rest of us who are left behind find a place to plant new roots and to find peace. 

**It is true that lately I have been attending an ELCA church here in Omaha and plan to make it my church home. They are quite welcoming and truly incredible, but it is not officially my home yet. I was hoping to wait until this summer, but it seems as though I will need to become a new member sooner than planned.