One week down here at the Wilderness Medicine Institute. It has been a tremendous experience so far. Academically, it is a bit like drinking from a fire hydrant. There is a copious amount of information that comes at us, and we can't really afford to let any of it go because every word of it is information that may very well mean the difference between life and death one day. This weekend, I had my first rotation in the Emergency Room. The ER is a very interesting place. It is, at once, a place where the most amzing things happen, where people are pulled back from the precipice of death, and a place where the most tragic things happen, where people slip over that precipice never to return to life in this age again. Just walking away from one shift gave me a renewed sense of the vaporous life that I have been given to live, and the utter importance of making that life count for more than self experience and self expression.
The people here at the WMI are, for the most part, tremendous human beings who value people, relationships, and life. The lesson that has landed on me especially hard while here is that our culture does not value self sacrafice, it values self expression and self experience. These values are so imbeded in my heart, and I assume most everyone else's, that it is hard to imagine life without them. This, if we are not careful, could turn out to be most tragic because the Coming Kingdom esteems self sacrafice as one of the chief virtues. May our Great Father grant us the grace to be counted among those who live as those who "count others as more significant" than ourselves.
May the Peace of Jesus be upon each of you.
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