When the Bible speaks of its own role as preparing the Man of God for every good work, what do you think it means by every? All good work would be included, right? Ok, then. What do you think it means by the word good? Well, after creating each day, God spoke of his own creation as good. And famously, Jesus directed any assessment of being good to God alone. So, it seems "goodness" has something to do with "Godness". Now God is not only in the business of saving people, He is also in the business of creating people. He cultivates gardens just as much as He cultivates the human heart. God is a God of the ordinary as much as the miraculous. In fact, we might contend by sheer percentage of time spent on each that God is actually much more a God of the ordinary than the miraculous.
Nevertheless, my point (admittedly borrowed from Tim Keller in his book Every Good Endeavor) is simply that each one of us has work that has value in as much as it reflects the character of God. Work outside of ministry can be good work. In addition, however, we each face distinct roadblocks and troubles in our own disciplines that need to be addressed. Because I work in healthcare, and am around doctors all the time, I found the following passage to be very relevant. I will be posting more about the thoughts from this book, but this is a potent start.
To let the gospel of Jesus shape how we work means to heed the influence of both the psychological idols within our hearts as well as the sociological idols in our culture and profession. For an example of this I will turn to the field of medicine. Some years ago I did an informal survey of several Christians in the medical profession. I asked them, "What are the factors inherent in the practice of medicine today that make it difficult to work as a Christian in this field? What are the main temptations and tests?" I was surprised, instructed, and helped by the answers I received.
One of the main problems mentioned was a deeply personal one - the great temptation to lose sight of your identity in your profession. The British preacher Martyn Lloyd-Jones was previously a successful physician in London. In one of his lectures to medical students and doctors, he said candidly, "there are many whom I have had the privilege of meeting whose tombstones might well bear the grim epitaph...'born a man, died a doctor'! The greatest danger which confronts the [medical professional] is that he may become lost in his profession...this is the special temptation of the doctor..." Another British doctor added:
...the temptation [is] for medicine to take over your life and rule your life as an enslaving power. It's a subtle one because...there is a kind of moral ego massage because you are giving so much - hours, responsibility, stress - to do so much good in other people's lives. There's a lot of self-justifying power in that kind of idolatry. It's much easier to feel morally superior as a doctor than as a stockbroker...There is also, in some people, the need to be needed and the power buzz you get from having influence...
Those in the helping professions (and that includes pastoral ministry as well as medicine) are tempted to feel superior because our work is so noble and so draining. And although medical professional pour themselves out in long, stressful hours and literally save lives, they meet plenty of ungrateful, unreasonable, and stubborn people who repay their hard work with venom and lawsuits. This can lead to a correlative spiritual peril. One doctor wrote:
It is easy to become extremely cynical about people and emotionally hardened to life. You see so much of the messy stuff of life and death that you feel your essential defense mechanism is to become emotionally detached and keep a distance in order to maintain your sanity.
Several doctors told me that only the gospel enabled them to see the traits of pride, cynicism, and detachment that were creeping into their characters. One said, "In the early days of a medical career you can work such enormous hours that your prayer life just dries up. That is deadly. Only if Jesus stays real to the heart can you be consistently joyful enough in him to avoid making medicine your whole self-worth, and then becoming hardened when you meet so much ingratitude."
My survey also revealed pressures on doctors that came from the culture. One woman I corresponded with pointed me to an article in The New England Journal of Medicine titled "God at the Bedside." The author was a doctor who often found that patients' spiritual beliefs and practice were very much a factor in their health issues, but "in the modern era, religion and science are understood as sharply divided, the two occupying very different domains." He wrote that he often found that patients' guilt and fears were factors in their illness and also that their faith in God was part of how they healed, but he felt completely unprepared by his training to address any of these realities. "Doctors," he wrote, "understandably are leery of moving outside the strictly clinical and venturing in the spiritual realm."
Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones makes the same point in one of his lectures to medical professionals. Lloyd-Jones was on staff at Saint Bart's in London under the famous chief of staff Lord Horder in the late 1920s. At one point the junior physician was asked by Lord Horder to rearrange and reclassify his case history records. He created a new filing system, arranging the cases not by name, but by diagnosis and treatment. As Lloyd-Jones did this task he was astonished that Horder's diagnostic notes in well over half the cases included comments such as "works far too hard," "drinks too much," "unhappy in home and marriage." At one point he spent the weekend with Lord Horder and took the opportunity to ask him about what he had seen in the case files. Horder responded that the reckoned only about a third of the problems that are brought to a physician are strictly medical - the rest are due to or aggravated by anxiety and stress, poor life choices, and unrealistic goals and beliefs about themselves. Severe cases, of course, could be sent to the psychiatrist, but most of the time that wasn't appropriate. So, Horder concluded, a doctor should basically mind his or her own business. Lloyd-Jones said that after he heard that response:
...we argued for the whole of the weekend! My contention was that we should be treating [the whole of the person's life]. "Ah," said Horder, "that is where you are wrong! If these people like to pay us our fees for more or less doing nothing, then let them do so. We can then concentrate on the 35 percent or so of real medicine." But my contention was that to treat other people [taking into account their whole life] was "real medicine" also. All of them were really sick. They certainly were not well! They have gone to the doctor - perhaps more than one - in quest of help.
Lloyd-Jones was not proposing that physicians were by themselves competent to do this, but rather that together with other counselors and helping professionals they needed to address the whole person. People have a spiritual nature, a moral nature, and a social nature, and if any of these are violated by unwise or wrong beliefs, behaviors, and choices, there can be interlocking physical and emotional breakdown. And even patients whose original illness was caused by strictly physical factors eventually need much more than mere medicine to recuperate and heal.
That conversation took place in 1927, but two trends have only exacerbated the situation that Horder and Lloyd-Jones were addressing. First, there has been an enormous increase in specialization, so that no single helping professional ever seems to have the luxury of looking at the whole person. Just as important is the growth in influence of a view that has been called "evolutionary social constructivism," which believes that "all aspects of every level of reality [have] a single evolutionary explanation." In effect the very concept of the whole person is vanishing. Our consciousness and emotion, our choices and desires, our goals and joys are increasingly seen to be the results of our genetic hardwiring. The old idea of a person consisting of body, mind, and spirit is gone - now there is only a body that has mental, emotional, and spiritual neurology. In addition to this reductionistic understanding of human nature, the increasing economic and legal pressures on doctors and hospitals are likely to push medical professionals more cautiously to "mind their own business" when it comes to treating the whole person.
Because they understating the effects of both creation and fall on the human person, Christians in the medical profession can resist the narrowing implications of this view. The Christian view of human nature is rich and multifaceted. God created and will resurrect our bodies - and so they are important! If God himself is to redeem our bodies (Romans 8:23) then he is the Great Physician, and the medical vocation could not be loftier. Bot God does not care only about bodies; he created and redeems our souls as well. SO Christian physicians will always bear the totality of the human person in mind. Their faith gives them the resources to muster the humility and the ingenuity necessary to see patients as more than just bodies.
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