the glory and the horror

It’s been a great trip home to CA. Kathleen and I were just saying how well this trip has gone, and we’re so thankful. We’ve had a wonderful time with family, although sadly, Andrew isn’t here yet.

We went to San Francisco yesterday, and biked all the way across Golden Gate Bridge into Sausalito. The weather was perfect – not too hot, a nice breeze. It was a splendid day. The only bad part was the hour long wait for the cable car on the way back in. It was a great workout, too. It was about 16 miles roundtrip, and there are some nice hills along the way, which left a nice burn in the legs.

I married off yet another roommate yesterday. Justin and Rachel actually got married within a year of meeting each other. That was kinda crazy. I mean, he’d met her before he even moved in! Anyway, it was a very nice wedding out in Weatherford, which is west of Fort Worth. It was quite a drive, especially on the way back, when we got stuck on I-30 just east of Arlington, where they closed down the freeway to 1 lane. 1 lane! It was crazy.

So tomorrow is the USMLE step 1, and I’ve done about 20 minutes of studying for it so far today. I think I’m just done. I think I need to move some furniture out of my apartment before Kimbell starts moving in tomorrow.

As a side note, TXU raised their utility rates again. I used less electricity this month than several other months, and am paying more than I ever paid. Stinkers.

CNN.com – Teacher suspended for washing student’s mouth out with soap – Jun 11, 2004

Unreal! If this happened like it’s reported, I don’t know how any reasonable person can see this as extreme or not proportional to the infraction. This is ridiculous.

So in the Marriage in the Early Church Bible study, we’re learning about how the early church worshipped, and guess what? They did it in the catacombs. That’s their graveyard. We both thought that would be an interesting way to do things today, especially in light of the generalized death anxiety in our society, even within the Church. It would be one way to re-integrate death into the experience of life.

For those of you who know me, you know that craftiness is not exactly my forte. I can handle simple things like wrapping presents, but give me a cross-stitch pattern or that for a dress, and I�m a lost cause (I have proof!). I think I even got in trouble in the 4th grade for having sub-par cutting skills. Needless to say, surgery is not really high on my list of possible careers. However, I am pleased with 2 recent creations (I’m not talking about twins folks, at least not yet). Phil and I are participating in a Bible study in which we read writings of church fathers and their commentary on marriage in the early church. It’s great! The guys meet in one group and the women in another. The woman who leads our section said that church history would be a whole new world for us. She�s right! This reminds me so much of college (oh, how I miss it!). At any rate, one of the requests of the leaders is that we each have a journal devoted entirely to this study. So�.I began to feel a bit crafty and decided to make my own! This move was inspired in part by the family of the man who�s marrying us. They actually recycle! In Dallas! For those of you outside of our beautiful cement city, this is a bit rare! It was also inspired by my relative lack of superfluous fundage to buy things like fancy journals. I took a piece of black card-stock paper for the front, a piece of cardboard for the back, and filled the middle with paper I’ve been hording since college with the intention of eventually recycling it. I punched 3 holes in every piece and secured them together with unwound pink plastic-coated paper clips (that last phrase can also be used as a tongue twister if you are or wish you were under 13 years of age). I wrote on the front with a nice pink iridescent pen that showed up nicely (which is good, because it�s too smeary to use for much else). Wha-la! There it is! My beautiful journal! Phil was so impressed by this uncharacteristic effort that he wanted one too! I made him one just like mine, only with blue iridescent ink and blue paper clips. Also, I gave his more pages as he is more verbose than I. Ah joy, I’m off to read for Bible study and take notes in me loverly journal! To be followed by Step One studying, not quite as lovely, but important none the less.

Things have been pretty boring lately. Sorta.

There’s been lots of studying, of course. Lots of material to cover.

But we’ve had some fun times moving Kathleen from her apartment to the same complex where I am living, and into the apartment that will eventually be OUR apartment, after we get married And there were some complications with her phone service which was finally taken care of yesterday, after over a week without phone service. I also spent a couple hours getting her DSL service setup, which was actually a fun thing to do, since I got to start it, and finish it, in a single day! It’s nice to be able to see the fruits of your labor, and be able to use them, even now, to do things like study and blog.

Med school graduation was also this past weekend, and so there were lots of parties and friends to say hi to, and bye to. There was also a lot of other stuff going on at the student center around that, so I also got to work a little, and make some money to pay off some of my expenses in recent months.

I’m also looking forward to this weekend, which is my old college roommate’s wedding. He’s been a good pal lately, giving me a place to hang out whenever I go down to Houston to visit people and stuff. There are also 3 other weddings this summer, 2 of which I will be missing, although I really wish I could make them. They’re all wedding of people from medical school, and I guess it only goes to show how our schedules in medical school are kinda goofy. So Kathleen and I are going to divide and conquer this weekend. She’s going to one wedding up here in north Texas, while I am heading down to San Antonio for Ricky’s wedding.

Tomorrw, I also get the chance to attend the Christian Medical Dental Association’s annual convention, held this year in Grapevine, right in between Fort Worth and Dallas. They have a bioethics track for a day and a half, and I’ll get to attend that, and her talks on all sorts of subjects, ranging from the standard genetic manipulation stuff to techno-fascism. It should be quite an interesting bunch of talks. I hope they don’t have a good bookstore, because if they do, I may have to leave my credit cards at home, or else I’ll run up more on my bill. Bad news.

There’s also this Bible study I’ve just joined that a friend of mine is leading. It’s a single-sex study on marriage in the early church, and we get to read men like Chrysostom and the way they say marriage in the life of the Christian. We started off with a discussion about the nature of authority in interpretation and understanding Scripture in the early church, and how it is different (or the same) as today. One key difference that was point out, which I tend to agree, is that there is a heavier emphasis on the nature of authority of certain people teaching. One thought is that the different roles/giftings of members of the Body of Christ to teach may be something of a prescription for some authority structure. Not heavy-handed dictatorships, but merely that there are some who have been specially gifted in the interpretation and teaching of Scripture, and that those people should be listened to above the voices of others. For example, the 7 major creeds of the church were agreed upon as orthodoxy by a community of believers at the time that were entrusted with the job of distilling the faith down to the important points – that which if one varied from, he was not legitimately considered a Christian. We also touched on the nature of faith in this process, since it would seem to our modern minds, which wants to demand proof and verification, usually by way of the scientific method, such faith in authority is crazy and unfounded. Why trust these men? And then the question turns around, and can be asked as “Why not trust these men, if God has truly gifted them, and the Holy Spirit is giving them insight as to what is to be trusted as true Christianity?” This is where I lean a bit more towards the side of tradition, not as in infallible revelation like the Roman Catholic Church, but as a source of authority about what great minds have pondered and wondered and considered in Scripture long before Phil came into the picture, long before modern exegetical methods, and long before modern seminaries.

Kathleen is in the corresponding women’s study on the same subject, and we’re both looking forward to it. There’s weekly readings, and they go clear into August, which is a bummer, because it means we’ll necessarily miss some meetings because of our call schedule and the like. This will piggyback well with our pre-marital counseling, and give us good discussion material, I hope. There’s a lot to still be talked about, prayed about, and dealt with for us, and I think that this will be a great help in that.

Speaking of our pre-marital counseling, we had our 2nd real sesion today, and it was very good. There’s a lot of stuff to be thinking about, in terms of what Scripture wants us to see in the symbol of marriage. Not only as a symbol, but as a very real experience, which represents other things, beyond the mere joining of two individuals in some civil union. Both of us are coming into this with our own baggage, our own expectations, our own fears, our own weaknesses, our own strengths, our own idiosyncracies, and we are slowly taking apart certain aspects of those things, knowing that they won’t be dealt with in just one sitting, or in one fell swoop, but knowing that it is the beginning of a glorious journey to support and pray for each other, and grow together, as members of the Body of Christ, as husband and wife, as parents, as a family in our neighborhood, as doctors to our patients.

We’re headed out to CA later this month, after we take Step 1, and we’re both really looking forward to that. I am looking forward to spending some good time with my family, and I hope it’ll be a good time for Kathleen and my family to get to know each other better, and for us to all bond together.

Sorry for being so bad at posting.

So I’ve been studying and preparing for the wedding. And then there are all these weddings this summer to go to or buy presents for. Unfortunately, I won’t be able to go to a couple of the weddings.

There’s a Bible study I’m looking forward to doing with Blake and some other PCPC people, on the early church and marriage. I’m really excited to be able to really dig deep into something, at least for part of the month of June.

Kathleen is moved into what will be our apartment after January 1, 2005. It was great because our friends are so wonderful, that we were able to move all the big furniture in one shot. It was wonderful! They were so helpful, and we are deeply indebted to them. Her phone line still isn’t up yet, so I can’t set up the wireless network yet. We should bug SBC about that.

Step 1 sutdying continues, and while I’m not very disciplined, I seem to be doing ok. It’s just over 2 weeks away though, so I really have to buckle down and make sure I cover everything.