Serving those who need it: an excerpt from the book Visions of Vocation

Last updated on: November 26, 2014 at 6:01 pm by Dr. Steven Garber

Serving those who need it: an excerpt from the book Visions of Vocation 2014-10-20T18:09:04-05:00 Dr. Steven Garber

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This excerpt from Steve Garber’s book Visions of Vocation is reprinted here with the kind permission of InterVarsity Press. Stay tuned as we continue to occasionally publish excerpts from the book here at Visions of Vocation the blog. And get the book from IVP at this link!

[Steve writes about some of his friends:] In the relationships and responsibilities of common life, they see themselves as implicated in the way the world is and ought to be. They see themselves as having vocations that call them into life, into the world—into a way of knowing that implicates them, for love’s sake. And in the unfolding of my life, living where I have lived, working where I have worked, I have met some of those people.

Todd and I met on his first day of medical school. Not unlike Jonathan, there was an unusual eagerness in him; he wanted to learn. So he too began coming over for supper , becoming a friend to our whole family. Not far into the relationship, I invited him to join me at a 7: 00 a.m. Eucharist at an Anglican church in the neighborhood of the University of Pittsburgh, where he lived and was in school. Todd became a regular, often offering his musical gifts to all.

Over the years I have had many opportunities to watch a young man begin to love a young woman. It is the eyes, I suppose, and Todd’s eyes began to light up when he saw Maria, another medical student. Within a year they married, and kept at their schooling. Maria seemed to be headed to a more academic track within medicine, while Todd had a public health passion. Rather than continue on with his four-year program, he took a year off in the middle to do a master’s in public health; at the same time, he spent a summer with a physician who had started a health clinic for a medically underserved neighborhood in Pittsburgh. Through that year, he and I met, along with some others, week by week studying ideas and issues that were foundational for forming a more meaningful vision of vocation.

Todd and Maria both went into residency programs, he into family practice and she into internal medicine. At the end of those years he became the chief resident and, with some other residents, began dreaming of another way to do medicine, something that would draw on passions they had been exploring together for years. One book they read was Denis Haack’s The Rest of Success, and his writing gave them reasons to rethink what ambition meant and what a good life might look like. A year later they formed a health clinic on the north side of Pittsburgh, near the stadiums, in a neighborhood that was medically underserved.

1452851742_c3f2290392_z As a wise friend has persuaded me, most things don’t work out very well. Even with hopes and dreams, the vision of a common practice was not sustainable, and eventually Todd and Maria took more responsibility for the work. By that time they had decided to reorient their careers, together taking up more creative schedules so that they could become parents of two boys and practice medicine as well. They became more deeply involved in the congregation they had found as medical students, and it became a sustaining community for them as their young family grew and their careers developed. The day-by-day work of physicians took them into a community of people who needed doctors who would know them and still love them.

All of us are like that, really. We hope that those who serve us will really care about us. They are not romantics; they cannot afford to be— in their own lives they have known enough sorrow. Their choice to enter into the complexity of medical care for people who need it but often do not take good care of themselves is reflective of a deeper way of knowing, a deeper vision of responsibility, a deeper kind of loving.

Over the years Todd and Maria have invested themselves in the city, becoming known as good doctors who do good work. Being attentive to the wider world, they have gone to other places too, giving themselves away to people who rarely see a physician, who rarely have any access to medical care. To see them in their work is to see people who love what they do and who love the ones they serve. That is the best part of a vocation— to love and serve with gladness and singleness of heart. When we take the wounds of the world into our hearts— not just for a day, but for a life— we long to see the work of our hands as somehow, strangely, part of the work of God in the world, integral to the missio Dei, not incidental to it. That is the life and the labor of Todd and Maria, husband and wife, father and mother, physicians together.

Image: Roberto La Forgia, “The Way.”

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