ClobberBlog

“It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. I have not come to call the righteous, but the sinners.”

Mark 2:17 was the first verse of Scripture that I ever memorized. “Doctor Jesus” was the theme for the summer camp that I went to between sixth and seventh grade, and the camp “t-shirt” that year was a greenish-gray hospital scrub with a terrible drawing of Jesus in a doctor’s lab coat emblazoned on the back. The whole thing strikes me as more than a little hokey and silly in retrospect, but if I can still recall the verse they were trying to teach from 18 years later, then I guess it worked. Well played, Nazarene youth camp leaders. Well played.

My relationship with doctors has generally been unhealthy. There are very few kinds of authority in my life which I accept uncritically; I’m the kind of person who must question and understand everything. Unfortunately, most of the doctors I’ve had have been people who seemed to like patients who just do what they’re told—and in fairness to them, some patients like that. I don’t. I treat my health the same way I treated my wedding-planning: I listen very politely and considerately to what other people think I should do, and then I do whatever the hell I want. My wedding, my body, same diff. I’ll certainly give greater weight to the opinion of a doctor in regards to my health, but in the end, there is no such thing as “doctor’s orders” for me. The only people who get me to do what they want me to do are the ones who persuade me to see things their way.

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(Cross-posted at Προστάτις.)

I woke up sick. Lightheaded, nauseous, my neck aching and throbbing like it needed to be popped. I almost never throw up. It’s like I have a high fortitude save, so I have to roll a 1 to throw up. In nine months of being pregnant with my daughter back in 2005-2006, it only happened once. Yet, on Saturday August 4, I threw up.

My summer had been pretty awesome up to that point. Scratch that, my entire year had been mostly awesome. I had completed 19 credits with nothing lower than a B (hey, it was Calvin—what do you want from me?), I had switched my thesis topic to something that I am zealously passionate about, I was eating healthier (thank you pescetarianism), I had kicked my dependency on caffeine, and I was learning to cook and losing weight. I had co-organized a new Mormon studies blog with the help of 24+ people much smarter and sexier than I am, and I’d had a blast at the 2012 Sunstone Symposium in Salt Lake City. John Dehlin called me a “rock star” after one of my sessions, so it must be true. I seemed to have my depression and anxiety under control, and it dawned on me that I felt happier with my life than I had been in years. I didn’t remember feeling so happy since my mother was alive.

My guilty secret was that I was finding all of this wholeness and balance and happiness without God.

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