Keep Your Courage Up

I love the fall.  I wake up each morning and let the cool air come in my window and great my warm lungs.  I let the smell of the season fill my nares and the changing colors brighten my eyes. Eden was never meant to experience autumn and I find it curious that I enjoy it so much.  I do not like the winter, the bitter biting cold that we have here in Iowa.  All the green disappears to grey, brown and white.  But the fall, the fall is wonderful.  It is like hating death while reveling in dying.

I spent the week thinking about Philippians 3:12-14.  It was our topic of discussion at Christian Pharmacist Fellowship.  I like the way the New Living puts it; “I press on to possess that perfection for which Christ Jesus first possessed me.” The idea is that this life is spent striving for something we will never achieve, yet we continue to strive.  That’s the way that God has always intended it to be.  God has grabbed hold and changed the direction my life was going. He directed me toward perfection.  The kicker is that I can’t get there, ever, at least not here. It’s not even one of those, “with God’s power I can be who He is calling me to be” type of moments. What God want is us to strive toward perfection, not to possess it now.  So I must ask why?  If sanctification was accomplished at the cross, why must I press on to possess that perfection?  The cross was just the start of it.  The cross is the door for me to choose to walk through.  Sanctification will be accomplished after this life.  If any of you have read through my past blogs, you know that I have struggled and continue to struggle with who I am and who I want to be.  That’s it, that is what Paul is talking about.  I want glory.  I want to be who I will be in glory. I get it when Paul says to live is Christ, but to die is gain.  To die is to possess what Paul spent his whole life as a Christian pressing on to achieve.  This week I have started to realize this.  It makes enjoying living a life that is short of what it is suppose to be a little easier because I know it’s the way it is meant to be.  God wants us to work out our salvation in fear and trembling.  Realizing who we are and who we are meant to be and fighting for get there. Once this veil is lifted, and we experience the truth, we will finally have what we have fought for.  I don’t know why God wants us to fight for it.  It is not about salvation or heaven or anything like that.  It is just how He has structured the life of a person once they are a Christian.  I think it is because once perfection is gained in glory, He will be glorified that much more for our fighting and pressing on for it.  We will appreciate who He always intended us to be and what it took to get us there.  It is a lifetime of autumn leading up to a winter I won’t have to suffer. It is an eternity of spring and summer, life and beauty, joy and peace.   

The part that really gets me fired up is when Christians are the last people who can sin, or churches where it’s the last place where you can be a sinner.  It anyone should understand sin is should be Christians.  We should know the human condition better than anyone.  Yet we have churches all over where Sunday best is so much more than a summer dress, shirt and tie.  It’s like we are children playing dress up once a week and act like we aren’t who we really are.  We act like what we think we should be.  Let’s just be honest everyone and act like what we really are.  If we are all screwed up inside, shouldn’t the fellowship of believers be the place where we get that all sorted out?  Not in these Churches where sinners don’t seem welcome.  How backwards does that seem.  Church needs to be a place where we are encouraged to keep pressing on to perfection, not acting like we already have it.

I have really gotten into this band Mumford and Son’s this past week as well.  They have some great, soul grinding stuff.  I love it when music makes me feel that way.  I went to the Iron and Wine concert a couple weeks ago and it was like that.  If you get a chance, check them out or Grooveshark them. 

Saturday was a rough day for me and the rest of Hawkeye nation.  I was right up at the field in the student section hawks nest.  It was a crazy game and a ton of fun to watch, just a rough finish.  I spent the morning tailgating with my former boss Roger Maharry and some of his friends and family.  Roger is a pharmacist who is pretty close to retirement but he gets what is going on in pharmacy better than most and has so much wisdom I have been blessed to learn from him.  I know I am going to be a better pharmacist because of his influence on me and I thank him for that.  He knows many of the problems pharmacy is facing and wants the profession to move forward as badly as I do.  That is not something you usually find in a pharmacist who is in his position and his age. We are in a difficult situation right now.  Those of us graduating from pharmacy are over educated for the positions in community pharmacy.  The option is to take a job that pays too much for doing too simple of work, or get paid to little to do post doctorate work and get a job that actual utilizes the complete skill set of a pharmacist.  And while this is the situation now, as central fill, mail order, and automation become more popular, pharmacists will lose their jobs because we are too expensive.  Eventually those community jobs will become fewer, and likely even less clinical. I will do a post doctorate residency for many reasons, but one of them is I worry that someday I will need it or I will lose it to a robot vending machine.   I want to do more that what pharmacists are allowed to do today.  There are plenty of pharmacists out there that I wouldn’t want doing more though.  They have become complacent making six figures doing final verifications and reading monographs to patients.  In many cases that is fine, they have paid their dues to the profession and are content with their jobs. I just don’t want their existence to hinder the progress of the profession.  I really get pissed when new graduates are content with that as well because that will hold the profession back.  We cannot advertize that’s all we are good for. 

It’s going to be another busy week with plenty of busy work to be done and a couple of exams.  That’s fine though, it’s all part of the process.  I am just glad that it is autumn, that I can enjoy dying and enjoy fighting for perfection all along the way.  Love you all, take care.

Parasympathetic Innervations

“There are two kinds of people one can call reasonable: those who serve God with all their heart because they know him, and those who seek him with all their heart because they do not know him.”  ~ Blaise Pascal 

It will be a long time before this weekend is fully digested.  My thoughts continue to spin around the challenges I face, but I face them a new understanding.  I spent the past weekend going from Iowa to Seattle, Yakima, and back again.  It was too quick of a trip, but we made the most of it.  My only sister, Kole, was married this past Saturday.  There was lots of laughter, tears of joy and love being shared that at times could only be expressed in soul groaning.  My soul continues to groan now that I am apart from and remembering such joyous occasions.  There is a lot that can be said about the Harold family but there are two things I know to be true.  We know how to have fun and we love most deeply.  I expected this past weekend to be exhausting but I left feeling more refreshed than I had been for a long time.

I continue to struggle with what it means to be.  Evan and I had a great conversation on our way back to Seattle on Sunday; all while we hoped and prayed the 4 remaining gears in his ’94 accord would get us over the mountain.  We started the trip with 5.  

The best way I can describe it is as though I am walking toward a great pillar on the top of a mountain. I can see the pillar in the distance, and I can see the road in front of me, but I cannot see much of what is in between. I don’t completely understand what it will take to get there.  I have been thinking about how God wants me to be something better than myself.  I was thinking about how this will culminate when this time on this earth is done, I will die someday and then see what God intended for me to be all along.  As I wrestled with this I could feel an excitement welling up in me.  I get to spend this life perplexed by this dichotomy that is who I am because of sin and brokenness, and who I am becoming because of blood and grace.  They are mutually exclusive parts, non-overlapping, and always changing in magnitude.  But the end is the exciting part.  I will see the dichotomy ended and I will finally just be.  I will be the person God intended for me since long before. 

The thing that I am beginning to see is why that God made it this way.  He is letting me flesh out this transformation and for once I am at peace with that.  This may very well be my time in the desert.  I am more excited for the journey that I have ever been.  Don’t get me wrong, I am scared out of my mind too.

I think something has changed for me.  I want God more than ever.  There is an eagerness building inside of me and an understanding that had been missing. These thoughts have turned out to be more rambling but as I said before, there is lot of digesting that needs to take place.  Thank you Kelly for telling me 4 years ago that God hadn’t given up on me, I think I can finally say I believe you.

I move onto another week of therapeutic exams, MTM projects, case presentations, and all the while trying to figure all this out.  The good news is I have great company by my side to get me through it.  I will lean on my friends and loved ones, enjoy good music, and roll with the punches. 

A Valediction Forbidding Mourning

Not another doom and gloom Nate post.  After reading though my posts I can see where readers get that idea. Those who are close to me already know this and don’t worry quite so much about me.  Evan calls my posts “intense internal reflection.” And it is.  As much as I would like to think that I was writing these things down for all of you, I really do it for me.  It is a way for me to sort through the cacophony that fills my head and my heart though out the week.  It allows me to document where I am, what I am, and keeps me going toward who I want to be. As I realize those things it usually is a sobering experience but trust me I always feel better, more in control, and more at peace.  I am not a person who suffers from depression.  I have been around many people who do and know more about the DSM-IV diagnosis criteria than most of you.  I just don’t want you to worry about me.  I am ok.  I am moving forward.  Above all, I am trying to be the person I think I should be.  I hope this blog challenges each of you to consider the same.  No person, no church, no society can tell you who you should be.  That is something found between each person and God. I will try to refrain from using such words as despair, depravity, deficiency, melancholy, and any other words splattered though out my posts, but just this once.

This week I have learned that I am still the scared boy at heart that I was in the 3^rd grade.  The difference is that this week I have chosen not to let those fears dictate my daily life.  I have let my fears prevent me from too many opportunities in the past, but not anymore.  This was the theme of my week. This began with leading the first CPF meeting Monday morning.  It went well but I know that there is room for improvement.  There were about 8 of us who showed up and we spent some time sharing our backgrounds and I shared about inter-denominational fellowship.  We spent some time praying for each other and our faculty.  The idea is to figure out what it means to be a Christian who is also a pharmacist.  I say it like that because it is drilled into us to define ourselves by our profession.  It makes sense because we will be professionals and that is how it is done among professionals. I have a hard enough time just trying to figure out what it means to be a Christian, naturally, outside of what I am told.  So we are working on that.

The next challenge was a lunch with the Dean of the College of Pharmacy and the President of the University of Iowa.  I was invited along with about 7 other students.  The salmon was delicious.  My stomach was turning the whole time and I had a diet coke which kept making me burp. 

Now for the big guns.  I set up a meeting with the Dean to discuss Rho Chi’s desire to fill any needs within the College of Pharmacy.  I really like the Dean, he just makes me really nervous.  He is a great guy to talk to, but he is still the Dean and I get that feeling like I am in the 3^rd grade about to head into the principal’s office.  I am the president of Rho Chi which is the Pharmacy Honor Society.  In the past it was just a way to pad your resume.  I want to make it into something that helps out our College and our community.  So I wanted to meet with the Dean to try and figure that out.

So why do I tell you this.  I would never have done these things nor had the opportunity to if I had let my fears get the best of me.  I am getting better at exuding confidence when I am freaking out inside.  I am sure I still sound shaky at times but I am getting better at it. Just like anything, practice helps. I want to encourage you guys to think about what things do you wish you were doing and what is holding you back.  I know it isn’t easy but if it is fear it’s not worth missing out on for that. This is all part of me trying to figure out who I want to be and how to get there.  I am learning and that involves failing at times.  I fail, I feel rotten, and then I usually write about it. This week there were some failures but there were also small successes. This week I decided to focus on the successes. 

The Con

I have challenged myself to be more balanced in this new school year. It is my last chance to get in right. I have committed to spending more time with my classmates and am involved more with the College of Pharmacy. I have committed to spending more time with Christians within the walls of contemporary worship. The commitment that I am most happy about is to spend more time re-establishing God as a priority in my life. I have gone ahead and worked it out on my own for the last couple of years and although I was successful in many ways, I have never been pleased with myself. My final commitment is to spend one day each week reflecting on this journey and writing about it here. If anyone actually enjoys this pathetic little blog, then you are welcome. I have also stopped eating potato chips and started eating carrot sticks. I have learned that you can pack away a lot of carrot sticks without feeling full.

So where is this coming from, where have I been? It’s been 4 years, 3 months, and 14 days since my last real blog entry. If you last read my blog when you were freshmen in college, I would now like congratulate you on graduation. Around the time I stopped writing, I began my journey into pharmacy school. I have learned a lot of chemistry, physics, biology, physiology, anatomy, pharmaceutics, pharmacology, therapeutics, medicinal chemistry, drug literature, biochemistry, and pathology. I have made little headway with my understanding of God and The Church despite my better understanding of the natural world and the human body. School provided a great distraction from my inadequacies. You see, I am really good at school. I get good grades and don’t have to work too hard for it; I get along with most people, and enjoy learning. I am not really good at God, and I am especially not good with The Church.

So why now, what happened? I don’t know. Nothing really happened that was good. I got hurt pretty bad and decided it was time to wake up and get it together. You see, I didn’t find any solace in the accomplishments as a student of pharmacy. I didn’t find any real solace from my classmates or college friends. I spent the summer dealing with this inside myself. I worked at it and resolved to overcome it. I did pretty good and could manage to go on but I wasn’t who I wanted to be. I don’t like cheesy Christianity because it is pretty close to face Christianity. I am going to be cheesy for a second; I wanted a God who loves me to lean on, I wanted to feel like he was there for me like all the songs say. I didn’t feel that. I don’t feel that. One of the things I really believe is true, like in the way you feel something in your bones, is that we don’t deserve an audience with God; it isn’t even something we can earn. I had a decision to make. I decided to try and be obedient. I decided to dig up the old passions that had been covered up with years of “other things.” I started by reading my old blogs and was burned deep inside by one titled, “Despair is the lack of the eternal.” It’s spooky how God works.

The article is about a dream my friend Allison had about me one night 5 years ago. I’ll give you an idea of the big points of the dream but if you get a chance you’ll understand better if you read the article. In the dream my real father had been in prison since I was an infant for some crime and was about to die on death row. He wanted to speak to me one last time before he died and I wouldn’t take his phone call. On the day of this punishment, I went to a lake with a box filled with letters and pictures from throughout my childhood and I threw them into the lake. I walked away alone and in despair. At the time I thought this dream was about our views of death. I displaced all personal connotations on some convoluted philosophy. I missed the point. “Despair is the lack of the eternal” was I titled I pick only because I had been reading Kierkegaard and I thought it sounded cool and deep. What I saw the other night as I re-read the blog after these many years is that I have a father who is not the man who raised me. That father is calling and called trying to get me to talk to him, think about him, relate with him. Years have gone by with my back turned to his attempts to get me back. And I was scared to think that there might me a day that it is done and I am left giving up on all we had at one time. I feel like I am getting close to that lake. I don’t want it to end like that.

If despair really is the lack of the eternal, then I need to grasp the eternal. I don’t know how that is done. If I do figure anything out though, I’ll let you know. There may be many things in this blog that could be heresy. I am just a young man that wishes he had the wisdom of an old man. I have a lot to learn and have made many mistakes. I really don’t want to offend anyone. I will be critical; I will be illogical at times. I’ll try not to though. I’ll try to be positive. I’ll try to be helpful.

So here I am, it’s a Sunday night and I am at Java House. Tomorrow morning at 7:30am I have my first Christian Pharmacist Fellowship meeting, one of those things I thought God was asking me to do. I don’t know if 2 people with show up, but that’s ok. I’ll pray for my classmates alone for the hour and be at peace with that. That said I am a little scared. I did a high ropes course today, that wasn’t scary. Both the Hawkeyes and the Seahawks won this weekend. God might still have a plan for me. I am going to give him the benefit of the doubt.

One last thing before I go for the week. Sorry I have been a poor friend to most of you. I know you understand, but I miss you and wish I could go back and do it all over. I will leave you with this. I was talking with a professor this past week and I realized something about my priorities. Pharmacy doesn’t need to be on top like is has been. Faith, Family, and Pharmacy is the order I need to work on and establish. Thank you for being my brothers and sisters for these many years. It’s time to get back on this winding dirt road. I hope to see you around the next bend.