Enactment

 

When the blue and red flashing lights lit up the cold, grey, emergency bay,

the scream of the siren announced her arrival and the horde came to life.

Like a well-oiled engine the doctors in their dark blue scrubs and

impeccably positioned stethoscopes came,

the tide of interns followed behind and moved quickly through long corridors,

gliding towards the entrance through the hallways.

The last haven before the afterlife.

They paused and hovered around her broken form like,

Aztec priests surrounding a sacrificial altar.

The woman lay on the stretcher and a pool welled from a ragged hole in her chest,

trickling into the cracks of the concrete ground,

creating a neon lattice of perfect red lines.

The lead registrar directed the stretcher into operating room ten, and they

moved her into the lit space where the clear tubes swung into place,

the plastic mask grasped her face,

stretched over her pale white skin,

forcing air into her failing chest, pumping, pumping.

A doctor called for adrenaline STAT,

the vial went into the IV line and they all bent in close to her exposed chest

pulling out silver instruments with sharp blades and

pointy ends and thread attached to

tiny metal hooks as they went to work suturing as if the fissure was like a

rip in a pair of old jeans.

Then the bell from the next world sounded and as

movement ceased in that glistening fist of muscle,

the throng paused and retracted their gleaming appendages, while the registrar

took in that simple flat line on the machine above her head.

He called clear and applied the paddles,

once, twice, thrice,

her figure twitched and danced,

an unseen puppeteer’s closing act.

Then it was still.

Then the priests took off their ceremonial gowns stained with blood,

having completed their ritual,

they moved back into their rehearsed positions and they

took their coffees in their hands and gossiped about

meaningless trivialities we all talked about,

before we dared dream of becoming guardians of the next world,

waiting for the next siren in the night.

Communication?

Today I got demolished.

Today us medical science students had our first human skills communications workshops. You basically walk into a room behind a one-way window and you interact and have a conversation with a simulated actor for four minutes.

How difficult can that be you ask? That’s what I thought.

But today when I stepped into that room and was confronted with a scenario that involved a somewhat disinterested woman with a kid with autism my heart beat fast with the nerves, the simulation got to my head and I just couldn’t be me.

I definitely didn’t feel that comfortable and maybe I should just have expected that I wouldn’t feel comfortable. But you see this is coming from a person who loves talking with people, doing life with people and sharing in the highs and lows of my mates. I know I’ll need to reflect on the whole experience and a bit of that reflection is going on as I write this.

Some people definitely found it better than I found it today and if you did I genuinely rejoice with you. That is actually so awesome. But today if you were in workshops and you got comments you didn’t expect, an impression you didn’t prepare for and two and half hours where your heart was beatin in your chest and you wish that you could just be calm then I feel ya and it’s all good.

This is what this experience is for. Let’s deconstruct. Reflect. Heck it’s ok to break down if that’s what we need. Because these are the experiences that tear down the confidence that tells us that we can socialise and speak at parties and with our friends. This will be a different ball game.

To my colleagues who I am privileged enough to do my workshop with I thank you for sharing in those vulnerable moments and sharing your stories and your experiences with all of us. In a way, I feel so lucky that I get to see you all at these moments when we are in our formative years and I look forward to this semester and the years ahead.

Today I got demolished.

Maybe that’s ok.

Much love.

Confessions of a polyphasic sleeper

I am a medical science student and I am a polyphasic sleeper.

The truth is out.

I didn’t deliberately try to become a polyphasic sleeper. Well that’s a lie…I did try to polyphasically sleep but I failed miserably. But when I got to the end of this semester I realised that I was already there without even needing to try.

For those of you who have no idea what polyphasic sleep is, polyphasic sleep is an unconventional method of sleeping which does not follow the normal biphasic sleep/wake routine where you sleep for say 7-8 hours at night and be awake during the day. Rather, polyphasic sleep usually has one ‘extended sleep’ and then mini naps during the day; people who want to get more productivity out of their day and want to sleep less usually follow it.

My normal sleeping routine as it stood at the end of semester 2 was a little something like this:

Sleep at 2am. Wake up at 8am.

Nap from 11am – 11:30am.

Nap from 4pm – 4:30pm.

Repeat.

Sometimes I’d sleep later than 2am and then I might nap three times in the day rather than two. (My friends can confirm this)

In terms of productivity, it’s good in theory! More time in the day to do stuff is always great. However, for me that time was 90% of the time spent doing useless stuff like watching YouTube or other typical procrastination methods. So after reaching the point of being able to polyphasically sleep, I decided that it was time to return to monophasic sleep before semester two began and so began my week long journey to re-learn sleeping. It began with a strict wake up at 6am, going for a run from 6am to 7am and then sleeping at 10pm every night. I banned myself from napping.

My experience on Monday was average. So average

The wake up was surprisingly easy. It was the night that was rough. I must have woken up at least 4 times during the night as my body, so used to being up at those early hours of the morning, refused to stay sleeping. I struggled through it and got a solid sleep from at least 3am to 6am. (The hours before that were troubled to say the very least).

Running in the morning helped heaps to wake myself up but by 10am I was getting these sleep urges. If you don’t know what that means, imagine the tired feeling you get at night right before you usually go to bed. That’s what I was experiencing but rather than it being at night, I was getting this kind of tiredness at 10am! I suppressed the feeling as hard as I could and forced myself to stay awake and by 11am the feeling passed. I noticed that there was an interesting trend. If I forced myself not to succumb to those sleeping urges, they would pass and I would feel completely awake.

I had another really strong desire to sleep at 3:45pm and this time I was so wrecked I collapsed on my bed and slept till 4:20pm and woke up refreshed. Slept at 10pm once again and fell asleep reasonably quickly. The plan is to cut out napping completely throughout the week and reach a point when I am not waking up in the night.

Update due in 5 days where I’ll post a day-by-day breakdown of the sleep progression and whether I succeed or not.

Stay tuned!

To get in touch with any thoughts shoot me a message at: continuallyconvicted@gmail.com

Pressure cookers

I study a degree where everyone is just flipping smart and so intelligent.

In a course where the ATAR cut-off is 99.6 and everyone is at minimum an OP 1, it can get very overwhelming at times. As students doing medical science and soon to be medical students, we all have goals and aspirations. We also are all used to being high-achievers. Anything less than a high distinction (7) is often viewed as sub-par.

In such a highly competitive environment which is just going to get more and more cut-throat as we progress past med school and into internship and specialty training, it is important to take a step back and recognise the feelings of inadequacy, insecurity and uncertainty which can surface are entirely normal. There doesn’t pass a month for me that I don’t question the validity of my place in medical science (and God-willing medical school) in comparison to the ridiculously smart people – my friends – who surround me and seemingly who have all the answers.

It’s ok to feel as if you’re just not on track.

It’s ok to feel as if you’re the only one feeling so out of it.

It’s ok to feel as if everything is too much and it’s all at once.

It’s medical science. It’s normal to feel overwhelmed. And I assure you that you are not the only one.

Amidst it all remember that we all experience these feelings every now and then. And if you’re in medical science with an ATAR of higher than 99.6, you’d be silly to think that your intelligence is not up to standard. It’s all perception. What’s more is that we all have our own different strengths. Some people can rote learn really well. Others have extraordinary emotional intelligence. Some gifted few have photographic memories.

So next time you don’t feel up to scratch, take a moment to remind yourself that this happens to us all at some point or another. Also please take a moment to speak to someone – a close friend, a family member – hell, shoot me an inbox if you need. The best thing we can do for each other as we get through our degree is to help out each other and keep each other accountable.

Let’s not let anyone fall off the radar!

To get in touch with any thoughts shoot me a message at: continuallyconvicted@gmail.com

A Review: Six month hiatus from Facebook

It is the 20th of June today – incidentally (completely unplanned) exactly 6 months since I deactivated.

I spent half a year off facebook and it was an experience that was both enlightening and difficult, funny and challenging but overall, rewarding.

I deactivated Facebook because I wanted some time away from social media. I won’t go on a rant on how social media is bad or something because it’s not. Social media is a great thing when used in the right way. Like everything, you just need to know HOW to use it. For me, it was consuming an inordinate amount of time and I knew I needed some time away to figure out life without a constant niggle in the back of my head to go and check newsfeed. So I said bye bye to Facebook on January 20th.

The first few weeks of not having facebook were weird. We’ve become such an internet generation that for me my fingers would sometimes automatically flick open my phone and attempt to open newsfeed or messenger before my brain kicking in to remind me that it just wasn’t active anymore. I also missed the random banter from that one random group chat that we are all a part of  and that we complain about but actually all are secretly are happy to be a part of.

By the third week though, I had adjusted to the change. I found myself suddenly with a great deal of time on my hands. I began initiating conversations a bit more often (no more nose buried in iphone). I stopped thinking about likes cause they weren’t there anymore.

I actually really enjoyed the semester without Facebook. To be honest I didn’t miss out on much and it was a nice change.

The last month has probably been the most annoying when not having Facebook began to become a severe limitation. When exam time came around, study groups were a pain to organise and sharing notes was just plain annoying. I felt bad when people had to ring me to invite me to events and birthdays and I myself began feeling a bit out of the loop when people knew things about other people from newsfeed updates and I was just lost. (Crazy how much we assume things based on seeing it appear on a newsfeed). I began using my friend’s account whenever I needed to do anything that demanded Facebook.

As I considered the good and the bad – especially with my own birthday approaching (let’s be honest facebook makes organising events so much easier) – I decided it was time to re-enter the foray of social media.

Today it’s the end of exams. I’m back. I signed in and Facebook opened it on my mac. I kind of breathed a sigh of relief…and proceeded to spend the next two hours updating myself on everyone’s lives. Hopeless.

Would I do it again?

Totally!

Truth isn’t relative

In a culture of acceptance and tolerance, it’s easy to become caught up with a trend of ‘your truth is yours and my truth is mine’ and let’s keep it that way because we are being ‘accepting’ of each other and not intruding on each others’ worldviews. There is a gapingly huge problem with this approach to life. There is a fact that we often forget or at least push under the carpet, almost too scared to breach this ‘political incorrectness’.

Truth isn’t relative.

Let’s use two rather random and trivial examples to illustrate this fact. If you walk into your closest Kmart, grab an xbox and walk out without paying for it, you’ve committed the crime of stealing. You may tell the store attendant that it isn’t actually stealing or that it’s just ‘borrowing’. You might even tell them that you are convinced that it is not stealing and that since you believe it’s not, it must not be stealing. Ultimately in this scenario the truth is the truth. If you take something that isn’t yours without paying for it, you are stealing and it doesn’t matter how much you try and convince yourself that you’re not, ultimately the truth here  is a constant.

You walk to the edge of a cliff. Below you there is a two-kilometer drop to the valley below. At that point, you tell yourself that gravity doesn’t exist and that gravity is a figment of people’s imagination. You tell yourself that you believe that gravity doesn’t exist and since you believe that, if you jump you’re not going to fall and you’re going to float. Your friend comes up behind you and yells at you telling you that you’re nuts and that you’re going to die. Gravity is real your friend says. You refuse to believe it because after all, truth is relative. What he believes isn’t what you believe. You’ll be fine you tell yourself because you believe gravity doesn’t exist. Ultimately though, only one of you is right. Either gravity exists or it doesn’t. What you think about it doesn’t change the fact of that reality. In this instance, it doesn’t matter that you believe gravity doesn’t exist. You’re still going to fall if you make that jump.

Let’s think about this for a moment. You might be asking yourself where I’m going with this. Well, I wanted to bring up those two random examples to illustrate the illogicality of ‘relative truth’. In being accepting of each other, we so often lull ourselves into a false sense of security by saying that ‘you can believe what you want to believe and I’ll believe what I want to believe and let’s keep it that way.’ This response is just so insufficient. Ultimately only one of us is right and that’s the reality of how the world works.

You see I once chatted to a friend of mine and because I’m a Christian, I brought up what I believe – that Jesus exists, died for our wrongs to make us right with God, that an omniscient God exists and that we have to make a choice as to whether he exists or not and act accordingly. My friend responded with, ‘I believe something different – and that’s fine. You can believe what you want to believe and I’ll believe what I want to believe.’ I was astounded. I was astounded because that’s not how the world works. Either I’m right and a God does exist, Heaven and Hell are real and we need to act accordingly, or I’m wrong and there’s no such thing.

Either a Buddist is right and karma and rebirth are real or they are wrong and it doesn’t.

Either a Muslim is right, Muhammad existed as a true prophet and the Quran is the truth or it just isn’t.

Either a Jew is right and Jesus never rose from the dead or they’re wrong and he rose and exists today.

But to say that we can believe what we want, that all roads lead to the same place and we are ALL going to be fine believing what we want to believe is just not logical.

We can’t allow this relativism to exist for beliefs. We equally can’t remain apathetic to what we think or believe either.

What we need to do is to examine the world that we live in, talk to the people around us and seek diligently in order to find the truth. Have a look at the claims of religion and equally examine the claim that God doesn’t exist and come to a conclusion. You’ll find that when you start this search you will realise and discover certain things which make a whole lot of sense. Let’s not use relative truth as a way of avoiding the difficult search.

To get in touch with any thoughts shoot me a message at: continuallyconvicted@gmail.com

Singleness. Is it such a bad thing?

There is this growing trend (actually maybe it was there all along but I never noticed it until recently) of our generation seeking relationships with urgency and viewing singleness (or a lack of experience with relationships) as sub-par or undesirable.

There is just SO much wrong with this mindset.

I could go on for years about how much I think this mindset is flawed but for the sake of attention span in reading I will try and summarise. Here goes:

Let me give you a scenario which is all too common for both guys and girls in our young adult stage of life. The situation is two friendship groups of people of the same age and mixed gender for both groups meet for the first time. For the next few hours to weeks, all everyone is thinking of is “who out of this group of people would be compatible with me?” Everyone is out there checking everyone other person out. Welcome to what is our social experience.

YES some of this is unavoidable. With hormones running through our body like crazy and a knowledge that we might actually be in relationships in the future, looking out for potential is all well and good. However if we start viewing everyone through the lens of: “Does this person have potential” then we mess up any possibility of initiating real, genuine and meaningful friendships. We mess up the whole friendship building stage. We miss out on the amazing times we have when we seek to get to know someone just for the sake of getting to know someone and with no strings attached whatsoever.

Singleness is actually an important thing. There’s a friend of mine who wrote this recently:

The capacity to be alone is the capacity to love; it may look paradoxical to you, but it’s not. It is an existential truth: only those people who are capable of being alone are capable of love, of sharing, of going into the deepest core of another person without possessing the other, without becoming dependent on the other, without reducing the other to a thing, and without becoming addicted to the other. They allow the other absolute freedom, because they know that if the other leaves they will be as happy as they are now. Their happiness cannot be taken by the other, because it is not given by the other.

It couldn’t be truer. We need to be able to get to a point of complete comfortableness by ourselves and in our own skin before we can seek to love another person completely and allow them to do the same. Toxic relationships are built when we seek to find someone to ‘fill a void’ within us. Becoming dependent on anyone just isn’t healthy.

In addition, by being single we inevitably get to extend our friendship circles and be close to a wider range of friends than if we were in a relationship. Having a girlfriend or boyfriend means that a large part of our emotional, thinking and time tank is devoted to that special person. Not being in a relationship means we can spread that out with a greater variety of people.

Being in a relationship isn’t for everyone. Even in saying that I feel as if I’m saying something that is taboo. But it’s true. Equally, that isn’t to say that wanting a relationship is a bad thing. On the contrary, it is a good thing. It’s just that before we can get to that point we need to seriously think about ourselves and whether we are ready for that step.

A good relationship is complimentary. It works because two people love hanging out with each other, know each other well and understand each other’s values and what makes each other tick. It’s never perfect because we all have our own problems and niggles that annoy us but it is a work in progress that is worth the effort.

With that vision in mind though, let’s be content in working on who we are as single people and building strong friendships in which we can genuinely care without needing to become possessive or dependent.

Peace out!

YNET Recap!

I have been slack dear readers!

Life got really busy in the past couple of weeks. I don’t know where time went! Studies, family and people were just absolutely everywhere and a lot of stuff just happened all at once without giving me time to think. There was heaps of good things and an equal measure of difficult things. But now that that period has settled down somewhat it’s time to put a few thoughts down on digital media.

YNET Conference, which happened, recently (it seems SO long ago) was one of the best conferences I have been to. To those of you who don’t know what YNET is, it’s a conference for all youth leaders in churches from all across Queensland. We all converged on the beautiful mountain slopes of Mt Tambourine and got to talk life, discuss what it is to have a role in shaping the kids in our youth groups and most importantly remind each other of the importance of keeping Jesus front and centre in our lives and in what we teach. It was such a good time to get away from the hecticness of our very busy lives and to get to reflect in the mountain air and share in friendship under the starry night sky.

I want to share with you all some of the stand-out things that we learnt about what it is to be a Christian and what it is to be a leader not just in life but also in sharing who we are in our faith with those we know:

Faithfulness is speaking the Gospel to other people and into other people’s lives (non-Christians and Christians alike). The key to encouraging one another is by speaking the gospel into each other’s lives. As mentioned in a previous post, by speaking the gospel and its message of hope we sufficiently and utterly deal with our insecurities and pressures which can confound us and leave us at loss as to what to do. We need to constantly remind each other of the saving grace of Jesus Christ.

We need to share life with the people we minister to and fellowship with. The power of hospitality and generosity is not to be underestimated. The most encouraging we can see is people willing to give of themselves and also people like us, walking the walk and doing life with us and alongside us. We’re not alone – and we shouldn’t have to feel as if we are alone. We need to walk alongside our friends – our brothers and sisters in Christ and encourage each other, keeping on together to run the race to eternity.

We need to better at warning each other! Warning each other is undoubtedly hard. Having a talk with someone about an area in their life which isn’t doing them any good is a talk many of us would avoid at all costs. But as friends doing this for someone else is SO important. Objectively we can often see things that others can’t and we cannot allow our fear of being branded ‘judgemental’ or ‘intolerant’ or ‘unloving’ to hold us back from speaking the truth in love. If you’re about to make a really dumb decision wouldn’t you want your friend to tell you to not follow through with it?

Faithfulness to each other is praying for each other regularly. There is something incredibly comforting about knowing that people are praying for you. We need to pray for each other and know each other well enough that when we pray for each other that we can pray for things which matter and which are meaningful. Most of all we need to pray that the work of the Gospel will be done and that in their lives, the Gospel will shine out through them, transforming and shaping them.

We need to remember that true passion is found in realising how incredible the message of the Gospel truly is. The message of the Gospel should genuinely excite us and fill us with joy. The grace we preach needs to transform us – if it’s so amazing why do we keep quiet about it?

I’ve only skimmed the surface with many of these ideas – looking forward to flesh them out in the coming weeks!

Until next time. DJ out!

To get in touch with any thoughts shoot me a message at: continuallyconvicted@gmail.com

 

Truth hurts but man it grows

I think one of the hardest things in life is knowing you have a flaw and it being illuminated in full by someone who knows you well. It’s not easy when you’ve been pushing that knowledge deep down for a long time and you don’t even want to think about it, let alone deal with it but it comes bubbling back up because someone else points it out.

Someone who considers themselves deeply and thinks about life and what’s important a fair bit usually has a pretty good idea of where they’re weak and areas in their life they would like to change. But a lot of the time, patterns of life, personality and habits are so ingrained that we dread the idea of modifying them.

What’s more is that a lot of the time these things have a way of running deep into the very core of who we are. To change these things is to challenge the way in which we view ourselves, the way we view others and the way we interact with the world around us. Often our security is found in these characteristics and to destabilise them means to destabilise our very sense of self.

There’s this idea that floats around that you should be who you are and be proud of it no matter what. All this self-empowerment stuff will tell us that we shouldn’t change ourselves for anyone and that who we are is integral, unique and beautiful. To an extent, they’re right. But on another level they’re wrong. If who we are and what we do hurts others, then we should shoulder the responsibility of righting those wrongs and doing what we can to ensure they don’t occur again by fixing whatever caused them in the first place.

The fact is, sometimes we DO need to change things about ourselves for the sake of the people around us and that’s completely fine. Don’t get me wrong. It’s a difficult thing to change anything about ourselves. It fact let’s be real, it’s terrifying.

But it’d be selfish to not do so.

We are all a work in progress. Me just as much as anyone. I know that there are areas in my life that I know I want to improve in, strengthen and just outright change. But like so many of us, I keep putting them off, not wanting to face the challenge it poses. Stuck in this impasse, what it took me and what it so often takes is someone else to point that issue out and speak absolutely candidly about it.

Loving our friends – truly caring about them – actually doesn’t mean following what has become accepted in our culture: which is to support them in everything without ever pulling them up on things that you see which they cannot or refuse to address. There’s this love that is talked about in the early church by Paul which has a Greek word which I can’t for the life of me remember. To summarise it true love is comprised of two things: love (or affection & loyalty) together with the part which is often missing – this concept of ‘exhortation’. Exhortation in that context has this incredible meaning of encouraging to do what is right and often that means picking up what is being done wrong or badly.

If we combine these two concepts – love and exhortation – we see a model of friendship that is counter-cultural and that really has the potential to grow each and every one of us. We don’t do this enough because we don’t want to seem pushy or rude, but ultimately it’s so important as friends to keep the people close to us accountable.

So thanks to the thoughts and accountability given by a friend, I am personally finding the impetus to finally begin tackling for real something that I want to fix and be better at. I have no idea where to start. I don’t know how it is going to turn out. I don’t even know how to do life if I change this area of who I am. But try I will.

I’m about to make a leap – but oh how glorious the jump.

I might even learn to fly in the process.

To get in touch with any thoughts shoot me a message at: continuallyconvicted@gmail.com

Mt. Tambourine Trip approaches

Heading up the mountain tomorrow arvo to go to YNET Youth/Kids Leaders Conference to further our skills in working with young people in churches, leading small groups and helping them grow in maturity and in their love for Christ in their formative years.

Super keen to get away from the hecticness of medical science for a long weekend and into the freshness of Mt. Tambourine to learn some seriously awesome skills and grow in my own love for my Saviour. It’s always good to get away from the busyness sometimes and get some time to reflect, catchup with old friends and make new ones. It’ll be a good time for me to take a re-stock of the year and prepare myself for the term’s worth of youth leading but also 5 more weeks of uni for the semester. Semester 1 is flying by SO fast!

Can you feel how fast this semester has been? Insane!

Hopefully I’ll come back refreshed – but it’s a camp, so chances are I’ll come back a little wrecked, but a good kind of wrecked – an accomplished kind of wrecked.

¹⁴ I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made;
    your works are wonderful,
    I know that full well.

Psalms 139:14