March 29, 2006
Hurdle
My annual physical, one of life’s little hurdles, generally took up most of the morning yesterday. I’m sure you know the drill.
The nicest thing about my experience is mostly my doc whose main claim to fame is not only his competence, but his lack of pretense and his gentle sense of confidence-instilling humor. Why more in that profession can’t come by those virtues is beyond me.
But we parsons should talk.
We do pretty well in the stuffed shirt department of life ourselves. Is it that we, when serving, only serve to make the served more vulnerable and often too easy to dupe, maybe even to intimidate? Perhaps it’s exactly when we make ourselves seem so indispensable that we make others seem so dispensable. It’s no way to run a railroad — or a clinic. Or a church.
Physical exams aren’t often a time of much bodily comfort, anyway. That is apparently unavoidable. But they don’t have to be simultaneously a time of such emotional discomfort. Our vocation is to help take the edge off another’s anxiety in whatever ways we are given. Simply by being competent and unostentatious as a human being may be one way quickly to realize and to serve the Christ in the other.
Duke Ellington put it rather well. “T’ain’t what you do, it’s the way that you do it.”