Against the grain

More wisdom from the late Richard John Neuhaus:

"Of course this business about losing our lives in order to find our lives goes very much against the grain. On second thought, maybe not. Maybe we have grown so accustomed to living against the grain of our humanity that we have confused ourselves about which way the grain runs. Maybe, if we follow the true grain of our humanity, it leads to our surrendering our all to the Other. Recall again St. Augustine's "You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you." Recall those old catechisms, both Protestant and Catholic, that asked the question, "Why did God make me?" Answer: "To know and love and serve him in this life, and to enjoy him forever in the next." Why did God make me? If we get the answer to that wrong, we get everything else wrong. Mary, following Christ, got that right. "

From "Death on a Friday Afternoon"


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Good Friday?

Atonement. At-one-ment. What was separated by an abyss of wrong has been reconciled by the deed of perfect love... Today, here at the cross, our eyes are fixed on the dying derelict who is the Lord of life. We look at the One who is everything that we are and everything that we are not, the One who is true man and true God. In him we, God and man, are perfectly one. At-one-ment. Here, through the cross, we have come home, home to the truth about ourselves,home to the truth about what God has done about what we have done. And now we know, or begin to know why this awful, awe-filled Friday is called good.

From "Death on a Friday Afternoon: Meditations on the Last Words of Jesus from the Cross", by Richard John Neuhaus

An almost perfect dinner...

After a victorious shoot-out in hockey, it was time for a nice meal:

A juicy 8 oz AAA grade rib-eye, marinated in Guinness bar-b-que sauce, with sweet garden carrots and seasonal green beans, and a side of vegetable orzo.

To drink: scotch and drambuie over ice, x 2.

And entertainment: 6-time oscar winning film "The Hurt Locker"

The only missing part (which would make it perfect): my wife, visiting family down south.

Mobile Posting

It's been a while. Too busy watching Olympics to write any posts! Go Canada!!

Now just testing out the mobile blogging app. Maybe it'll lead to a few meaningful posts of things that come to mind, and not just more "info" on the information highway. Going for wisdom, not just pure number of posts or useless knowledge.

Blessings.
Luke.


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

iPod, iPad... iPoo'd

Lots of fuss about the latest Apple gadget, the iPad, revealed today. Here's another one, the iWheel:


Apple Introduces Revolutionary New Laptop With No Keyboard

I prefer the iPoo'd, as long as it's not "fully charged", if you know what I mean!

Copenhagen Smokinhagen Part 2

The Copenhagen summit did not meet it's goal of a worldwide agreement to fight "climate change"... maybe because not everyone agrees?? Just found a good article in The Daily Mail about what I mentioned last post. From the article:

The Copenhagen summit, supposed to produce an agreement limiting greenhouse gases, has, according to experts, the same carbon footprint as a medium-sized African country such as Malawi.

There are an amazing 34,000 delegates attending the event, and the grander among them are forced, says my colleague Robert Hardman in Copenhagen, to park their private jets in Norway because Denmark has run out of Tarmac, and to procure their gas-guzzling limousines from Germany.


Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-1236497/STEPHEN-GLOVER-50-days-save-world-I-listen-doomsayers-werent-ludicrous-hypocrites.html#ixzz0aPDgWvVB

So what are we to make of all the fuss? Time to start walking the talk.

Copenhagen Smokinhagen

So the largest ever climate conference finished up, and all they came up with was a document saying "we'll take note" and might do something about it?!???

Let me get this straight. How many days, and how many delegates (and assistants, and assistants to the assistants of the delegates), and private jets, and motorcades, and heated hotel rooms, and purified water in plastic bottles (made thanks to the oil sands, by the way! but they should clean up their act too), and at the end of it all:

"Climate change?"
"Yah."
"Well wha' do ya wanna do?"
"I don't know, wha' do you wanna do?"
"I don't know. Hey, now don't start tha' game again."

(remember the vultures from the Jungle Book cartoon???)

Here's a thought: why don't we start living responsibly?? You know, shut off extra lights, waste less, car pool (or plane-pool for those big wigs), give to charity, and maybe ask for a little corporate responsibility...

Oh, right. We're in a morally relativistic society. I can't tell you what to do, because what's right for me isn't necessarily right for you.

Garbage. A bunch of garbage. And smoke. In Copenhagen. Smokinhagen. Unfortunately, garbage is one thing we're not short of.

Merry Christmas vs. Happy Holidays

There's a website that tracks (based on customer reviews) the Christmas-friendliness or offensiveness of retail stores during Christmas time. Basically how "politically correct" are they trying to be?? And seriously, what's politically incorrect about saying "Christmas"?? I mean, c'mon, everyone knows it's called Christmas, so what's the big deal?

The site is Stand for Christmas.
Some of the big winners:
- Bass Pro Shops - 98% Christmas friendly
- Cabela's - 95%, never heard of this place... although I'm not the biggest shopper...
- Land's End - 89%

And the big losers:
- the Gap - 82% Christmas-offensive
- Best Buy - 77%, and I think their commercials are ridiculous anyways
- Banana Republic - 75%

Check it out for yourself and read the reviews... then hit those malls!!!
Ha! Better yet, check out Compassion, or World Vision, or your local Pregnancy Care Centre. Gifts can be made "in honor of", and often they'll give you a card to write to the receiver. Those gifts leave a much more lasting impact... seen it first hand. Amazing.

Random Act of Reconciliation

If there was more of this going on, our world would be a much happier place:





Seen on a street near our house a few weeks ago.

The Body is Awesome!

We're going through "The Truth Project" with some people from church... talking about science today, the search for truth, to understand the particulars of the world around us. Following the truth leads me to believe there is a designer. There are so many amazing and awesome things in this world to say it was just chance and randomness and time that gave us the universe as we know it.

Here's one little clip: "The Inner Life of a Cell" by a company called XVIVO, made for Harvard Medical School. Shows some of the cellular processes in just one white blood cell. What you see in 3 minutes goes on millions of times per second in your body. Wow.



The heavens declare the glory of God - Psalm 19:1
The fool says in his heart, "There is no God" - Psalm 53:1
Since the creation of the world, God's invisible qualities - his eternal power and divine nature - have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse. - Romans 1:20

Cancer sucks.

Been working in the Emergency department these past few weeks. Finished today's shift on a bit of a downer...

A fairly healthy looking guy in his mid-50's came in with sudden blindness in one of his eyes. Sure he had diabetes, but it wouldn't cause vision problems like that. Turns out he had been battling lymphoma (cancer of the lymph nodes) earlier this year, and had a mass removed in his forehead 9 months ago...

His CT Scan of his head looked a little like this (but not esophageal cancer):


So, how do you tell a middle-aged guy he has cancer in his brain?
How do you tell him his 6 months of chemotherapy didn't work?
How do you tell him his stem-cell transplant didn't work?
How do you tell him his time is limited, he's going to die?

With grace and truth, I hope.

"It is appointed unto men once to die, but after this the judgment." -Heb 9:27.

Medispeak Multiple Choice

During my studies and reading, I come across some interesting words. Some medical terms that have a funny ring to them. Here's a few, and this list doesn't even include muscles! Can you guess what they mean?? How many can you use in regular conversation??

1 - Borborygmi
2 - Gubernaculum
3 - Hematochezia
4 - Melena
5 - Uvula
6 - Obstipation
7 - Verruca vulgaris
8 - Astrocytoma
9 - Xanthelasma
10 - Tophus


Possible answers:
A - soft tissue projection from the middle posterior edge of the soft palate, ie: the dangly thing at the back of your throat.
B - cholesterol deposits in the skin, often around the eyelids
C - rumbling or gurgling of the intestines, from movement of fluid and gas; stomach growling
D - dark or black sticky tar-like poop, contains partially digested blood
E - severe or complete constipation, not passing any gas
F - reddish-maroon poop, from bleeding in the colon
G - star-shaped brain tumor
H - folds of peritoneum (abdominal cavity lining) that attach to the gonads during development in the womb
I - large lump of uric acid deposits under the skin, often over the elbow, occuring in people with gout
J - the common wart


Answers:
1-C; 2-H; 3-F; 4-D; 5-A; 6-E; 7-J; 8-G; 9-B; 10-I

Scoring:
0-3 right answers = this quiz gave you obstipation?
4-6 right answers = take care of your borborygmi, then hit the books
7-8 right answers = no xanthelasmas blocking your view
9-10 right answers = genius! you can diagnose astrocytomas

Disappearance of Moral Knowledge

Just found an excellent article, via John Patrick, discussing why there is a lack of morality in society these days, why it has disappeared. This helps to answer what I brought up in my previous post about the absence of morality of doctors and the institution's attempt to fill it with "professionalism and ethics".

So without further adieu, here is an excerpt from Dallas Willard's Beyond Moral Bewilderment:

... There is a steady downward pull on human life, and special counter-forces are required successfully to resist it. In their absence, lives, dynasties, and nations crumble and fall. Many today think that, if our current state of affairs is not quite as Isaiah said, we are steadily moving toward it. Sometimes this is attributed only to enhanced will to evil. But one way of characterizing the condition of North American society at present is to say that moral knowledge—knowledge of good and evil, of what is morally admirable and despicable, of simple right and wrong—is no longer available in our world to people generally. It has disappeared as a reliable resource for living.

Grab a coffee and enjoy the read!!

Doctors and virtue

From "The Hand of God", by Bernard N. Nathanson:

The minimal description of a doctor then is this: a highly trained technician, daily exposed to exceptionally powerful material and spiritual temptations. It has been my experience that only those who have an inflexible inner spiritual column supporting the immense weight of medical obligations and responsibilities survive intact the lure of the worldly temptations in the medical world: the uninterrupted flow of money, the drumfire of flattery, and the inebriating effects of special privilege. It is no accident that great early physicians and scientists were deeply spiritual: Hippocrates swore his oath to his gods; Aristotle (perhaps the greatest empirical scientist of all time) revered the idea of God as the Prime Mover; Claudius Galen, who built upon the work of Aristotle and Hippocrates, early on declared himself a monotheist and was cherished by Arabic and Hebrew physicians who followed in his wake; and Rabbi Moses ben Maimon (Maimonides), a codifier of the Talmud, was a talented physician to the court of Saladin in Egypt and wrote the Guide for the Perplexed, which strove to marry the elements of spirituality with the science of medicine. William Harvey, the discoverer of the circulation of blood, was convince of the evidence of a Supreme Creative Intelligence and practiced his Protestant religion zealously. Without such an absolute guide to virtue, doctors, exposed as they are to greater temptations than most, are likely to fall further.

So this begs the question... what kind of doctor do you have? What kind of doctor am I?

Medical schools these days are good at selecting smart, even brilliant, students, but they have no way of instilling virtue. Indeed, there is often a bias against anyone with such a foundation, although we seem to get in anyways!

There has been the appearance lately in medical schools across Canada (and I'm guessing the States and elsewhere) of "Professionalism" and "Ethics" classes in an attempt to fill the void left by and increasingly secular and amoral physician body. And of course, we don't take the oath of Hippocrates anymore - it was changed and edited and spit shined in order to cover those that practice the more fringe medicine that we see being forced on society (abortion, assisted suicide, embryonic stem cell use, etc.). But I digress.

The point is, if you have the option, find yourself a doctor with moral integrity and virtue.

September Long Weekend...

If you haven't been, you need to go. Beautiful. Just be ready for the wind.

Abortion in Alberta... time is limited??

This, from Alberta ProLife:

Abortion is something we would like to wish away.

The fact is abortion is a business. You and I, as taxpayers, are on the hook for between $6 and $8 million each year. That’s what it costs to abort over 12,000* little ones in Alberta-each year. The provincial government says it only funds “abortions that are medically necessary.” In fact, it pays for all the abortions performed in the province, whether at hospitals or private clinics.

The truth is abortion is an act of violence that destroys people’s lives. In 2004 almost 40% of all abortions were repeat procedures (performed on women who have obtained a previous abortion). Less than 5% of all abortions are performed to protect the mother’s health or life.

The fact is the majority of Albertans polled over the past 15 years oppose tax-funded abortion.
The time has come to de-fund abortion.
Helpmake it happen.

This is a grassroots campaign to de-fund abortion in Alberta.
Give financially or volunteer your time or expertise.

Campaign to De-fund Abortion in Alberta
Box 11479 Edmonton, AB T5J 3K5
or e-mail apl@albertaprolife.com.
You can call us at 1-877-880-5433.
Donate • Contact yourMLA• CallUs

* Reference: Alberta Reproductive Health: Pregnancies and Births Surveillance Report 2009

Abortion Distortion

The health minister in Quebec recently tried to enact universal standards for cleanliness for surgical procedures... standards that apply to hospitals, smaller public surgical clinics, private clinics... and standards that would apply for any type of surgery - breast cancer surgery, appendectomy, gallbladder removal, wisdom teeth, abortion...

Whoops, did I say abortion? The actual bill didn't mention any specific surgery, just that all sites performing surgeries need to meet the safety requirements. Well, the pro-abortion lobby jumped right on it - this bill (by a pro-choicer, I might add), would shut down 3 abortion clinics until they could renovate! Then how would women get the abortions they need?

Here's the CBC article: Quebec abortion clinics excused...
Not quite accurate in its reporting, but the essentials are there. 2nd paragraph should read: "Bill 34 would have required all surgical clinics to have ventilated operating rooms and surgical clothing for all staff."

Andrea Mrozek and Rebecca Walberg, founders of ProWomanProLife.org, have written an excellent commentary about the whole debacle, published in the National Post August 21: The Abortion Distortion.

Definitely worth the read, even if you don't like the whole abortion debate.

19.19 seconds

Incredible. Absolutely incredible.



(try this if the above doesn't work: Bolt 200m Record... or just look it up on YouTube!)

What can you do in 19.19 seconds??

One Small Step...

From CatholicVote.org

Are you Normal?

From the Summer '09 issue of Geez Magazine:

Normal is getting dressed
in clothes that you buy for work
and driving through traffic in a car
that you are still paying for -
in order to get to the job you need
to pay for the clothes
and the car
and the house
you leave vacant all day
so you can afford to live in it.
- Ellen Goodman

Ouch. Yes, for now, I'm normal. But working on that. And You?