Saturday, November 26, 2011

Noah and the Bugs-- Seasonal Suffering

Many people are aware of bacteria and viruses, but not exactly what they are.  Bacteria are small, single-celled organisms that can live in all different environments, including humans.  We all have bacteria on our skin and in our mouth and nose and in our intestinal tract.  The bacteria in our gut are very helpful, helping us to digest our food.  Other bacteria cause infections and other serious problems.  Bacteria can be grown in a culture, usually by depositing them onto a culture medium like agar in a culture plate which is then kept in a warm environment.  The agar is like gelatin, providing nutrition for the bacteria.

Viruses, on the other hand, are not cells.  They barely qualify as one of God's creatures, but are more like one of God's things.  They are a collection of genes inside a structure that invades human cells.  Unlike bacteria, they do not survive outside of a host organism for very long.  Whereas bacteria are perfectly capable of reproducing anywhere they live, viruses can only reproduce inside a cell.  They invade the cell and hijack the cell's own DNA, forcing the cell to make more copies of the virus.  After enough virus has been made, the virus particles rupture the cell, spreading on to the next cell and throughout the body.

This Thanksgiving I have been suffering from a particularly vicious cold, caused by one of the common cold viruses.  The common cold is caused by a huge number of different viruses, usually a rhinovirus or a coronavirus. Once you have been infected with a specific cold virus, you will develop immunity to that virus and not get infected with it again, just like you only get the measles or mumps one time.  The problem is that there are at least two hundred different cold viruses, and they keep mutating into different versions, so it is impossible to develop immunity to all of them.  This is the same reason that an effective vaccine to the common cold cannot be developed.  Although antibiotics work well with most bacterial infections, they do not work at all on viral infections.  Basically, then, the only weapon we have once we get a cold is prayer.  Each time I get a cold and I have prayed for healing, God has always answered my prayer-- seven to ten days later.

So colds are part of the suffering that God has in his plans for us.  I try to imagine the difficulties Noah had in preserving all these bugs that afflict us.  For the bacteria, I imagine he would only need to get all the different bacteria, load them onto culture plates with agar, and place them into his wood fired incubator.  The viruses, on the other hand, would have to be carried by humans.  So I guess that Noah, Shem, Ham, Japheth and their four wives would have each carried around twenty-five cold viruses to survive the flood.  I am surmising that God, in His mercy, would have somehow protected them from all the symptoms of having twenty-five colds at one time or that would have been one miserable ride on the ark. 

I really don't know why God allows suffering or why he allowed us to get colds.  It goes back to original sin, the fall, when Adam and Eve disobeyed Him and brought sin into the world.  Back then, in the Garden before the fall, Adam and Eve must have lived peaceably with the cold bugs.  But now we do not, and I'm not sure there is a great personal lesson to be learned from this form of suffering.  It happens because we live in a fallen world, and sometimes bad things happen to us for no other reason.
Although we can draw closer to God in all of our sufferings, not all of them bring a message. It is part of the human condition, only to be rectified when we get to heaven, and if I don't survive this cold (and it sure feels like I won't), fortunately it will be my last one. I am hoping to be blessed to be around long enough to get many more colds.

Saturday, November 19, 2011

Are You Blessed or Cursed? Marginal Suffering.

What is the opposite of black?
What is the opposite of lost?
What is the opposite of hero?
What is the opposite of blessed?

If you are like most people, you answered "white", "found", "coward", and "cursed".
But what if something is neither black nor white? Can something be found if it was never lost? Just because you are not a hero, does that mean you are a coward? If you are not blessed, does that mean you are cursed?

From a Christian standpoint, if we have a saving relationship with Christ, then we cannot think of ourselves as anything else but blessed with regards to the ultimate blessing. We will get to spend eternity in Heaven. For others, only the opposite is true. There is no second, third, or fourth place; if you don't go to heaven you don't have other options for eternity in Detroit or Philadelphia. If you are not eternally blessed, you are eternally cursed, to spend that eternity in hell.

Earthly, temporal blessings, however, do come in different degrees. Some people are blessed a lot, and others not so much. And there can be blessings of different degrees in different aspects of our lives-- you can be beautiful and poor and healthy and smart all at the same time.

The problem arises when people raise the suffering flag just because they feel they aren't blessed as much as someone else. This is envy. And we have seen a lot of that lately.

The Westminster Shorter Catechism was written in the 1640's as a way to teach common people theological truths. It does this with a list of questions and answers. Question 80 asks "What is the Tenth Commandment?" And the answer is, "The tenth commandment is, 'You shall not covet your neighbor's house; you shall not covet your neighbor's wife, nor his male servant, nor his female servant, nor his ox, nor his donkey, nor anything that is your neighbor's.'"

Question 81 asks, "What is required in the tenth commandment?" And the answer is, "The tenth commandment requires full contentment with our own condition, with a right and charitable frame of spirit toward our neighbor, and all that is his."

Question 81 asks, "What is forbidden in the tenth commandment?" And the answer is, "The tenth commandment forbids all discontentment with our own estate, envying, or grieving at the good of our neighbor, and all inordinate motions and affections to anything that is his."

Right now in this country, there are a lot of people who think that they are suffering because they do not have as much as someone else. Many people running for political office are promising to fix their problem by taking from one person and giving it to another. But are you poorer because someone else is wealthier? Are you poor because Donald Trump is rich? Are your finances weak because Oprah's are strong?

I am particularly fascinated by the Occupy Wall Street Crowd and their Occupy movements in cities across the land. Although they may have a legitimate grievance about government bailouts of the financial industry, they are not protesting the government who took the money from some and gave it to others, they are protesting the people who received the money and then turning around and demanding that the same be done for them. They are looking at the wealthy and "grieving at the good of our neighbor", and having "all inordinate motions and affections to anything that is his."

Just because you are not blessed does not mean you are cursed. A lack of blessings is not suffering. The things that I envy are the qualities of Christ where others seem to have been more blessed-- the qualities of people who are kinder, more caring, and more full of mercy for others than me.

Saturday, November 12, 2011

The Suffering Schedule

What if you knew when and how you were to suffer?  Suppose you knew that you were going to have a car wreck Wednesday at 2:00 pm?  How about if you knew in advance that in the second week of next month you were going to be diagnosed with cancer?  Suppose you were given notice that tomorrow when you went into work you would be called into the office and told your services were no longer needed?  Would you like to know beforehand that this weekend your child would be hit by a car?

Are you prepared to suffer?  You're saying, "Dr. Moore, of course I am prepared.  I have automobile insurance in case anything happens to my car.  I have a great health insurance plan from my job that will cover me in case of illness.  I have an emergency fund and unemployment insurance in case I lose my job. My children are covered if anything happens to them."

No, I didn't ask you if you were financially prepared.  Are you, yourself, prepared for the suffering that is to come upon you?  I don't want to shock you, but these things are going to happen.  Everyone that has lived, is living, or is yet to be born is going to suffer.  Unfortunately, we are not given a schedule in advance that tells us exactly how we are going to suffer and the exact time.  We have to know in advance that these things are going to happen to all of us.  As Jesus says in I Peter 4:12, "Beloved, do not think it strange concerning the fiery trial which is to try you."

Think for a minute about one of my patients who comes in for a lung biopsy.  I perform the biopsy, and they go home and wait for the result.  The pathology report comes to my office and I review it and the diagnosis is lung cancer.  God, in His sovereign power, knew since the beginning of time, before the foundations of this world were laid, that this would be the answer.  I knew the answer when the pathology report reached my desk.  My patient knows when they come into my office and sit down across from me and I break the news to them and their spouse.  At this point, the only one who is surprised is my poor patient.

And that is the way it is for so much suffering.  We are so surprised when it happens.  When our car is struck by another vehicle on Wednesday, we are jolted.  When the phone call comes that our child has been struck by a car, we are overwhelmed by the shock.  If only we could be told in advance, so that we had a schedule of our sufferings, then we could at least plan for it and not be surprised. 

We don't get a suffering schedule, only the advance knowledge that we will suffer.  It is up to us to plan and prepare, to be ready for when it comes.  Hopefully, the discussions that follow will you to plan for these terrible things, to be ready for them, and be better able to deal with them.  Forewarned is forearmed, and although God has not given us foreknowledge of the exact suffering that will be coming, he has indeed given us advance knowledge that we will be suffering.  This should not provoke anxiety but rather calm.  We should not lose sleep over this, but instead sleep peacefully knowing that although these things are forthcoming, God has forseen what is to come and has provided preparation for us.

Monday, November 7, 2011

The Authority of Suffering

Well, hello.  You may be wondering about this blog, who I am, and why I would write on such an unpleasant topic like suffering.


My name is Dr. Tim Moore, and I am a practicing Cardiovascular Surgeon in Leesburg, Florida.  I have been a practicing heart surgeon for nearly twenty years.  You can see my profile below.  I am a Christian heart surgeon and author of the book, Surviving the Suffering, due out next summer.


What makes me an authority on suffering?  Well, first of all, my job is to cause people to suffer.  Each weekday morning at about 7:00 am I take a scalpel to someone's chest and perform heart surgery on them.  This alone is good enough for some short term suffering.  Although I am inflicting pain on my patients, it is for their greater good, and to ultimately relieve even worse suffering from a heart attack or heart failure.


Secondly, my patients' families suffer alongside their loved ones as they recover from surgery.  And on rare occasions, when someone doesn't make it through open-heart surgery, they suffer from the loss of their family member. And I suffer some with them as well.


Patients don't always realize it, but many of the people caring for them have suffered or are suffering.  I see that too, in my colleagues and co-workers and in all the many people that make up our open-heart team. Just like everyone else, we have team members who get ill or lose loved ones.


Finally, I have done a bit of suffering myself.  I was born with respiratory failure and required a tracheostomy as an infant.  I was hopitalized around seventy-five to a hundred times growing up and eventually had to have part of a lung removed.  In addition to my chest surgery as a child, I have had two abdominal operations as an adult. 


By no means is my defintion of suffering restricted to illnesses and surgery.  In my future posts I will explore a variety of different forms of suffering, with the most important message being that all suffering is not the same.  It is when we fail to diagnose the form of suffering that afflicts us that we do the wrong things that make our suffering worse.  Hopefully we can find a better way of surviving the suffering.