Real Life Christianity

“Shayna, can I talk to you about your CV when you have a minute?”

I was the first student into the room and was eager for his feedback. As one of my two faculty mentors authoring a medical school recommendation letter, I had also asked my professor’s advice about tweaking my working person turned student CV.

“OK, I’m ready,” I declared, after unloading my books and removing my coat.

By this time, my study partner and another student had arrived, but our class is small (five people) and we are a close cohort. There were still 10 minutes before class started, so I was ready for the critique—regardless of their presence. He seemingly didn’t hear me, though. Either that, or his comments were bad enough that he was waiting to deliver them in private.

Three hours later, when he asked me to stay after class, I had the sinking feeling that the latter inclination was correct.

“I just have a question about this…well, it seems that you’ve written a book,” he started.

I realize that being able to write a book doesn’t necessarily lend credibility to any future competency as a physician, but let’s be honest. Handling a successful writing career with a book project and full-time school shows a tremendous amount of determination. If anything, it should speak to the passion and fortitude I would bring to the medical field.

“Well, I mean, whatever your religious beliefs are…I mean, those are your religious beliefs…,” he continued.

He was rambling in an unusual and unexpected way and I knew we were on the brink of a very dark turn.

“…It’s just that I can tell you now that there are few, if any, medical schools in the country that will want to accept you if they think that you’re some kind of creationist that doesn’t believe in Darwinism and biology and…I mean, are you a creationist?,” he interrupted himself.

It would have been the perfect opportunity to faithfully declare that yes, I am a creationist! Unfortunately, I am also a people pleaser who needs affirmation and acceptance—especially from professors writing letters to get me into medical school.

“Well, I do espouse some evolutionist theories,” I tried to respond tactfully. “But, I also believe in creation. I don’t know what that makes me.”

My weak attempt at diplomacy had been transparent. He raised his eyebrows and sighed deeply.

“It just raises a red flag,” he told me. “No medical school wants to see that.”

It was the first time I had received such blatant advice about concealing my religious beliefs. If anything, my K-12 public school education taught me that educational institutions are responsible for protecting the beliefs of every religious, cultural, or other zealot. Not only had my beliefs not been criticized growing up, but special accommodations were usually made to respect them.

“I think you should take the book off your CV,” he counseled. “I really want to see you succeed,” he reassured me. “I want to help you.”

Regardless of how bad it sounded, I knew he wasn’t meaning to be hurtful. He was acting on good intentions and I believed him.

What he failed to ask me about, however, were the more than ten years of scientific research experience also listed on the same CV. What about the fact that I attended Johns Hopkins University on a full academic scholarship because of my science background? The list of university, private, and government lab positions—fueling both biomedical and clinical research—was so extensive that I had actually asked other mentors if I should purposely exclude some of them.

How could authoring a Christian book single-handedly negate my empirical science skills and raise doubt about my competency in the classroom? The thought was mind numbing.

Still, I know that his response was indicative of an accepted world view. He did me a favor by giving me advanced notice of what is to come and I’m grateful that my expression of shock and horror combusted on him and not say, the interview committee at Harvard. Still, I will be respectfully declining his advice to remove any record of my faith-driven work from my CV. If come this time next year, the only medical school I’m accepted at is a Christian one (heaven forbid!), you’ll know that it was because I didn’t properly conceal my scarlet “C” and accidentally paraded my crazy creationist views to the world.

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I try not to harp on this too much, lest I actually become obsessed with it, but you probably already know that my living situation is not…ideal. I mean, upon move-in, it seemed like it might be tolerable. I would be renting a basement apartment of a spacious home in an upscale Washington, DC neighborhood. Living in a cave with minimal sunlight was not my preference, but the price was. I moved in last July.

For the first few months, I was amicable and friendly with the home owner—a successful interior designer who lived alone with her dog. Eventually, though, frequent requests started to strain my tolerance and ability to be kind. Could I please not raise the heat above 64 degrees? Space heaters were purchased. Could I not leave any lights on at night? I became adept at finding the keyhole in pitch blackness when I came in. Could I make sure to remove my laundry from the dryer as soon as it stops? I started doing my laundry when she was not home.

It wasn’t the frequency of the requests that was annoying, it was their pettiness and her unsolicited commentary that accompanied them.

Overall though, I knew that it wasn’t about me. It was about the lack of control in other facets of her life. Her marriage was in shambles, her existence was solitary and isolated, and recently, she found out that her only stable companion in life—her 13 year old dog—has lung cancer. So, this morning, instead of purposely avoiding her and ignoring the fact that we were home at the same time, I met her in the upstairs kitchen bearing a bouquet of flowers and a note wishing her well at the vet appointment today.

 

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I was told that her relationship with God was tenuous before I was told her name.

We were the same year at Johns Hopkins University and at the time, the same major. She had springy, fun curls and a penchant for international travel. In fact, she had just returned from a year in Italy. She also loved the kitchen, but I can’t remember how I knew this. Maybe she told me once. Maybe I asked her to help me.

Before her, it was just me and my tiny dorm room kitchenette that provided the spread for the Adventist student fellowship on Friday nights. I was happy to do it, but it was a challenge to say the least. After she started coming to Friday night meetings, though, things changed. She had an off-campus apartment! And a real kitchen! And, most importantly, girl could cook. Really cook.

In the kitchen, we talked. We laughed. Whatever insecurities she may have had about her humble relationship with God was masked by our common appreciation for unique ingredients and exotic spices. I didn’t care whether she chose to come with me to church or not. I never chastised about the fresh vegetables we used that I knew were purchased from the local farmer’s market on Sabbath morning and I already knew that the guy she was dating was not a Christian. After all, I was familiar with the sting of rejection myself. Petty comments and outright diatribes delivered in an attempt to “help me” by my own Adventist people. People who focused more on whether I wore a ring on my finger than whether or not I understood God’s love or needed theirs.

We lost touch as friends often do, but a year ago I visited her in Chicago where she was finishing a Master’s degree at Northwestern. When I realized she was living in Washington, D.C. three weeks ago, I sent her an email. Her response came a few days later.

“Oddly enough I thought of you as I was waiting in a cab yesterday at 4:30am, outside the Shady Grove train yard. I think because I was praying sooo hard that [a lost item] would somehow, impossibly BE there. Sad to say, it’d been a while since I prayed like that, and I thought about you, and your burgeoning book career, and JHU churchtimes. Maybe I could come with you some weekend…”

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It was sometime during my senior year of college when, sitting across from my editor in her office in Hagerstown, I asked her a question.

“Michelle, do you ever feel like life is moving so fast that you’re just getting dragged along in its wake?”

I was being completely serious and not even remotely dramatic.

I had already been working at Insight for a year while I finished my B.A. full-time at Johns Hopkins. I was also a resident advisor in the dorms, working two to three mandatory “duties” per week, completing a senior internship at a local hospital, and planning, coordinating, and leading the weekly worship services for the Adventist fellowship group of which I was the founder and president.

For months, life felt dangerously out of control. I would collapse, rather than relax, into sleep only to be ripped awake after four, maybe five, hours a night by the ringing of the phone, the cell phone or the alarm. I was constantly jumping up to care for a resident, send some important email, get to work at the hospital, the Residential Life office, or the magazine. More than once, I had lamented that life lacked the sort of emergency stop button that you see on carnival rides.

Four years later, that horrible overwhelming feeling of being dragged in the wake of responsibility, requirement, and work had almost been forgotten. Almost. This semester, the frenetic pace of finishing my graduate program has caught up with all of my classmates. Some have resorted to valerian root and other supplements to conquer anxiety enough to be able to sleep. Others are now rarely seen without their ubiquitous cup of coffee. Personally, I prefer to blog about the tragedies of life and console myself with the pithy biblical truths that I know are the only real panacea (I’m kidding about the first part).

Three weeks ago at prayer meeting, Pastor Dehm reminded us that as Christians, we are always going to have waves in our life. It is the very nature of the Christian experience to be challenged by the sweeping and sometimes overwhelming surges of frustration, hardship, and discouragement. It’s not our job to question the frequency, duration, or severity of the waves, though. We’re not supposed to look at other people’s waves and we’re definitely not supposed to decide that God has destined us to get dragged along in the path of our own waves. The way that we handle chaos and tragedy in our lives is one of the most distinctive markers of an experience that sets us apart from our non-Christian counterparts.

I never learned to surf when I was living in South Florida, but maybe I should have. After all, Pastor Dehm reminded us that the only thing that God truly requires us to do is to ride the waves in our lives. We have to let go of the control, stop fighting against the currents, and just stand on our surfboard of God’s promises. (Lest this analogy be lost on the more serious among us, yes, I was chipping my car out of the ice shield that bound it yesterday too.  God’s promises are a snowboard too, OK?)  Whatever your waves are right now, remember that you’re not going to drown.  No matter how deep the ocean is, it’s not deep enough to keep God away from you (Romans 8:38-39).  Get on that surfboard and ride.

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“I thought we weren’t supposed to talk about politics or religion,” he said jokingly. “You’ve just done both.”

I had only met him in person twice. The last time was at Rooney’s–an Irish pub in the Palm Beach International Airport–an hour before my flight departed for Washington, D.C. I had taken time off a week earlier to go to South Florida to care for my mother (who was suffering from a debilitating eye problem). My flight had been canceled on the way down and I was put on his—a connection through Baltimore. It was there, before we boarded, that our conversation began.

“Oh, please,” I flippantly responded to his reprimand.

From the time we met, our dialogues had been laden with both politics and religion. Whether appropriate or not, the subject matter simply couldn’t be avoided. I am, after all, a Christian writer. I can’t even explain my profession without stating my beliefs first. For him—a lawyer—I imagine it was slightly easier to exclude.

During our second meeting (at Rooney’s), he told me of upcoming plans with “a group of people I hang out with [up north].” I suspected a cult or even mafia-like association from his ambiguous description, but both assumptions were wrong. I’d later find out that he was referring his role as chaperone for a youth group in Connecticut—one of the three states where he practiced law. He was a Christian too, but had been cautious about disclosing it.

For many of us, we will be fortunate enough to never have conflicts arise between our faith and our profession. There will never come an occasion that faith absolutely must be mentioned in the description of the career we give, because our employment will never be compromised by the beliefs we have. Unfortunately, this is not true for thousands of Seventh-day Adventists, Jews, and other Sabbath keepers.

This Tuesday Feb. 12, a representative of the Seventh-day Adventist church will be testifying before Congress in support of the rights of Sabbath keepers and other people of faith in the workplace. The Workplace Religious Freedom Act, if passed, will require employers to provide a substantial reason for denying time off on Sabbath before dismissing a Sabbath keeping employee—a measure that does not currently exist.

Whether or not you have personally been affected by religious discrimination, religious persecution is very real and already affects believers of all faiths worldwide. If for no other reason than the realization that discrimination eventually affects us all, I urge you to start praying for the situation now. Then, consider sending a letter through www.religiousliberty.info in support of religious liberty for everyone (If you’re not confident about writing your own, there are pre-written letters on the site that you can send).

Real Christianity requires us not only to be unabashed about who we are, but to bravely and willingly stand up for others and their right to worship too.

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