AMEN Australia 2019 Conference: Witnesses Unto Me

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Adventist Medical Evangelism Network Australia

Daryl Cheng

Faith and Work

We are grateful for this opportunity as we explore the concept of faith and work.

May your Holy Spirit be with us even as we open and come into the Sabbath hours this morning and for the rest of the day.

All right, you know in medical school, they show you slides.

The only person who cannot answer these questions is Justin because he probably already knows the answer.

This is a particular slide of a, anyone know what this is?

Oh, We've got some very good, any microbiologists here?

This is something we call schistosomiasis.

For any of you who have done mission trips before, you may be familiar with this illness.

Schistosomiasis is a little bug that looks like this, and here's how it works.

In other words, it lives in the body of freshwater snails.

When you go swimming in a body of water and the snail comes along, this little creature jumps across through any bite, cut, mark, anything in your foot goes into your body and causes a huge amount of chaos.

I met this bug for the first time when I was going on a mission trip to Tanzania.

I was seeing patients in the clinic, and 1 after another, the patients came with terminal hematuria.

For those of you who are not doctors, that means when they pee, when you pee, your urine turns red, looks like blood, at the end.

So there's this story, you know, this old gentleman would come in and say, oh, you know, I'm going to the toilet and I'm peeing, and then at the end it turns red.

And in all my 3 and a half years of wisdom of medical school, I was like this has to be something drastic, you know, bladder cancer or some other weird thing.

I'm like, well, you know, maybe he's got glomerulonephritis or some other condition.

So 1 patient after another after another was this pattern.

They would be peeing okay and then at the end it would turn red and it would be really painful.

And so I was just recognizing this pattern and I said something's not right.

So I went to the more experienced mission doctor who was from Tanzania, and I said, what's going on?

How come everyone in this village has bladder cancer?

And so that's how I met this little creature.

You see, in medicine, we learn things by patterns.

When they teach you in medical school, you're supposed to recognize a pattern.

If you've got this, this, and this, then it equals to that.

If you've got this, this, and that, it equals to this syndrome.

And we learn to function and recognize patterns and how they work.

And sometimes we also learn how to recognize when patterns don't fit.

When you've got something that doesn't quite fit and you're like, oh it doesn't quite fit here and so we're gonna do this test and maybe it's something different.

And people write case reports and all sorts of articles and journals about things that don't fit patterns.

You know, sometimes in our Christian life, we also function with patterns.

We're supposed to go to church on Sabbath, we're supposed to do this, and we function, and we get so used to getting into a pattern of doing things.

You know when you get busy, you start to lose and your attention starts to go everywhere.

And maybe doing 1 thing here and 1 thing there and all over the shop.

And sometimes even in a busy medical practice, you go all over the place.

You start jumping from 1 thing, or then there's another patient here.

And for those of you who've ever worked in an emergency department, you know what I'm talking about.

You've got 1 patient going here, you've got 1 patient over there, you're trying to figure out what's going on here, someone else is here, someone's yelling, someone's screaming, and all your attention is split all over the place, and you start to lose the ability to recognize patterns and when people don't fit different patterns you're used to.

Daniel Goleman has this very interesting saying, the circuitry for paying attention is identical for the circuits for managing distressed emotions.

The attentional circuitry, in other words the way your brain is wired, needs to have the experience of sustained episodes of concentration, for example reading a text, understanding or listening to what the teacher is saying, in order to build the mental models that create someone who's well educated.

In other words, what he's saying here is that the way our brain functions is that we need to learn to pay attention to things and the way we pay attention and learn to recognize patterns is by seeing it, understanding it, listening, and going through it again and again.

So when you are so used to looking for something, you will recognize when something doesn't fit the pattern.

And the way our brain works is that this is the exact same place that we learn to manage distressed emotions.

Isn't that what being a witness in the workplace is?

But sometimes when we go about our business We are so busy with our own life that we forget how to recognize when things don't fit a pattern Physician burnout is 1 of those things which is a big hot topic nowadays and when you look at the new ICD-11, I didn't even know there was ICD-11, there is apparently now.

And ICD-11 defines burnout as when you start to have a separate distance, a mental distance from your work or the practice of managing distress, emotions, and patience to the extent that you cannot engage in recognizing patterns.

Now you may be wondering, why is Darrell talking so much about patterns today?

I love this chapter because it describes Jesus' day in the clinic.

For those of you who are familiar with Matthew chapter 9, you know that Jesus goes through this clinic and he heals a whole range of different patients.

There's the man who is a paralytic, There is a man whose daughter has passed away, his name is Jairus.

There's even the woman who needed healing from a bleeding issue for many years.

This is the chapter of Jesus' day in the clinic.

And if you've ever been in a clinic before, you will know that a clinic is all about recognizing patterns.

You know which of your patients on your clinic list is going to be the problematic 1.

You know Which of the patients on your list is going to take you 45 minutes because the mum is going to talk to you about everything other than what they are there for.

You know which patient to put at the end of the day because you know that's the patient that can get you out on time to go home.

And so Jesus comes into this clinic and I want you to notice exactly what he does when he's recognizing patterns.

The first story is he heals this man with palsy, but I want to jump down to verse 9.

As he's walking along, he sees Matthew the tax collector, Matthew chapter 9 verse 9, the Bible says, Jesus passed on from there, he saw a man named Matthew sitting at the tax office, and he said to him, follow me.

This is the most unusual patient in this cohort.

If you look at every other patient in this clinic, they have some physical ailment.

They can't walk, they can't see, they can't hear, they're bleeding, they are paralyzed, but Matthew is the only person on the outside who appears well.

He's also the only 1 in the clinic who does not come looking for Jesus, but Jesus comes looking for him.

And so my question is, when you're going about your busy practice in your everyday life, how many times do you stop to recognize the patient, or perhaps the colleague, who does not fit the pattern?

Or do you just go through patient 1, patient 2, patient 34567, and you're jumping from 1 to another.

Oh yeah, this one's got a cold, this one's got a virus, this one's got this, this one's got asthma, and you go through and through and through, but you don't stop to recognize when someone doesn't fit the pattern.

As Jesus sat at the table in the house, that behold, many tax collectors and sinners came and sat down with him and his disciples.

Jesus picks Matthew up, this man who in his heart, you all know the story, this is a text collector, in fact some people say Matthew is full of ironies.

Matthew is his Greek name and Levi is his Hebrew name.

Some people think that Levi was not just a nickname, but a symbolic representation, or rather a literal representation, of which tribe he belonged to.

This was supposed to be the tribe that would lead the people of Israel to worship God, who would stay faithful to God, but he was the 1 in the Jewish eyes who betrayed the nation by becoming a tax collector.

Jesus recognizes that in Matthew's mind, he's struggling and grappling with what he is supposed to stand for and what he's supposed to do and even sitting in the tax booth collecting the tax money was a wrestle for Matthew.

And Jesus saw in the corner of his eye as he's passing through this clinic that Matthew needed help.

How many of your colleagues that you walk by, that you work with, that you have lunch with in your practice, in your clinic, in your hospital, in your university, do you recognize that needs something different?

And so Matthew, startled, being called up by Jesus, follows him and we soon learn that he organises a dinner at home.

And at this dinner, many tax collectors and sinners came and sat down with him and his disciples, verse 11, and when the Pharisees saw it, they said to his disciples, why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?

Matthew comes together and sits down, and here's the crux of the thing, verse 12 and verse 13.

When Jesus heard that, he said to them, "'Those who are well have no need of a physician, "'but those who are sick.'" Everyone who's wandering around with Jesus can pick the pattern of who's sick.

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Faith and Work

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