Presentation given at the AMEN Australia 2018 annual conference held in Adelaide, Australia, www.amenaustralia.org.

AMEN Australia 2018: Healing, Surviving, Thriving

<p>Presentation given at the AMEN Australia 2018 annual conference held in Adelaide, Australia, www.amenaustralia.org.</p>

<p>Free sharing permitted under the Creative Commons <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/us/">BY-NC-ND 3.0 (US)</a> license.</p>

Adventist Medical Evangelism Network Australia

Allen Lloyd

Maintaining Healthy Spirituality as Healthcare Professionals

We can't really maintain in regards to spirituality.

We either have to be improving or we are actually going the other direction.

And so improving spirituality would certainly be maintaining as well and I think that is probably what Antoinette meant in regards to this.

1 of the big temptations to physicians, and a little bit of background, I was never planning on being a doctor growing up.

There was no medical people in my family.

I didn't come from a medical household or aunts or uncles or anything like that that was involved.

My father was an engineer, a design engineer for General Motors.

When I was in high school, people used to tell me I should be a doctor because I did well in school and did well in the sciences and math and those sorts of things.

I used to tell them, well, I know 1 thing I'm not going to be.

I don't know what I'm going to be, but I won't be a physician is what I used to tell the people who would say that to me.

While after graduating from high school, knowing that I didn't want to waste time in college, I really wanted to figure it out my summer before I started college.

There were 3 physicians from our local church.

I had been converted at age 15, it's another story.

So I wanted to do what was best in serving the Lord, and I was planning on a couple of different possibilities as far as profession, 1 of them being a pastor, another 1 being in law, and also considering others.

But 3 physicians from my local church took me out to eat for the express purpose of telling me that you can actually be a sole winner as a physician and reach lives that way.

So I wanted to, that's the first time I put it on my radar screen.

Then I went through this big decision-making process.

But in this process of them taking me out to eat, they did mention this.

These were godly physicians and they mentioned that there are some temptations that are coming your way and you need to consider this.

1 of the temptations is you are going to have a temptation to become proud.

You are going to be asked for high positions, you are going to be asked for things like this and there is a chance that you are going to start feeling self-sufficient.

They also told me that it could be a problem that if I had temptations regarding women.

They said you're going to be surrounded with a lot of good women and working with more women than men in this profession of medicine.

If you're a godly physician, there's a lot of women that are going to like you and the way that you treat them.

You're going to have temptations coming your way in that direction.

Then they also told me there'd be temptations in regards to the money part as well.

Of course, We're told that it's actually harder to maintain your spirituality when you have means than when you're poor.

And There have been studies regarding that, and there's been certainly evidence.

And even 1 of our, perhaps 1 of our greatest presidents, Abraham Lincoln, says, if you want to test a man's character, give him riches.

And So they talked about those temptations so that I would have a full disclosure regarding to what I was getting involved in if I went that way.

So with this temptation to be proud and self-sufficient, what is the remedy for this?

First of all, but I ran into an individual who clearly, at least according to many people, and I believed what they were saying in regards to what he was saying and their behavior, there was no doubt in my mind that what they were telling were true, and it was also corroborated that this individual had a significant problem with pride.

When I had to go talk to him about some of the issues that this was causing, I never mentioned the word at all, but as I was just dialoguing and asking some questions, he says, you know, I've been accused of others of being prideful, but I can tell you I am not prideful at all.

And he was very proud of his humility, or at least what he thought was his humility.

And so sometimes we need a little help to know whether we might have this.

And there's a little book that we sometimes utilize in our program.

It's called What Your Counselor Never Told You.

And the subtitle of it is the 7 sins that lead to mental illness.

And the first sin that's mentioned is the sin of pride.

And then there's a little test to see whether you might have it.

Trying to be noticed, craving attention, Itching for compliments, needing to be important, detesting the idea of being submissive, loathing the idea of admitting to wrongdoing, strongly opinionated, being argumentative, demanding your way, wanting control over others, flaunting your individual rights, refusing advice, being critical, yet resenting any criticism coming your way, being oversensitive, and finally, thinking you have excellences you actually don't even have.

If you have 1 or more than 1 of those, pride is there.

Wounded pride is gonna follow, and you're gonna run into a lot of issues that are actually caused by you, and caused by this pride element in you.

Now I know we have a group of physicians here so I won't necessarily say what specialties are more prone to pride than others, but there are some of you might be aware of some of the evidences in regards to that.

But physicians who can take something that nobody else can fix, and then they can fix it rather readily, and you do that over and over again day after day, and there can be this temptation coming your way.

In contrast, we have the life of Christ and in the biography written about him, it says Christ was never elated by applause.

Now, out of all people who have walked this earth, perhaps he should have been allowed to have some pride.

He created us and he created us in ingenious ways.

This new aspect of creating this world with embryology and reproduction.

And there's no scientist in the world that can explain why it's happening the way it's happening.

When 2 cells come together and then you get 4 and then 8, and then you get after a lot of cells, you get all of this migration where the nervous system is forming, and then all of the different systems are coming together.

It's amazing when it happens, but they have no idea.

We can't really trace, we're not sharp enough with all of our ways of measuring to really know why it's happening or anything like that.

But yet, despite being an ingenious creator, beyond comprehension, he was never elated by applause, Nor was he dejected by censure or disappointment.

If you're never elated by applause, you won't be dejected by censure or disappointment.

In fact, it'll be a little bit like water off a duck's back.

Amid the greatest opposition, by the way, if you think you're having opposition in your life, or you think some of your patients are having opposition, there's someone who's faced more opposition, and that's Christ.

Amid the greatest opposition and the most cruel treatment, he was still of good courage.

This is what can happen when we are truly humble.

This is why he could say the words as well as live the words, blessed are the meek, blessed are the poor in spirit.

When we get questioned by patients, we should not flaunt our MD degree and our specialty training or our scores or our previous success.

We should be as Christ and have that spirit of humility.

This is a daily exercise of putting all on the altar of sacrifice laid for the Lord.

Speaking of prayer, this is 1 of the ways of improving and maintaining spirituality.

But in the book Education, Ellen White says prayer and faith are closely allied, and they need to be what?

In the prayer of faith, there is a divine science.

Often, we think these 2 are disconnected.

But she puts them together and says in the prayer of faith, there is a divine science.

By the way, prayer has been studied and subjected to scientific method.

That's a whole nother discussion, but prayer does make a difference.

It is a science that everyone who would make his life work a success must understand.

So are there any group of physicians excluded from this?

If you want to have your life work as a healthcare professional, truly be successful.

The science of prayer is something that you need to understand, not just in knowledge, but experientially.

How I do it is go to a place where you can pray out loud.

Did you know Christ prayed out loud virtually all the time?

In fact, he would go out in the morning and go out in the hills and he would pray out loud.

And his disciples would be looking for him, trying to find him, and then they would finally find him.

And then they would hear the communion that he was having with God.

And they recognized they weren't anywhere close to that.

And that's when they said, teach us to pray.

You know, A lot of times people lose their focus in prayer.

Maintaining Healthy Spirituality as Healthcare Professionals

Transcript

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