Not Learning our Lessons

During my freshman year of medical school, a junior medical student told me, "Everything you need to learn you will hear ten times. All you have to do is learn it one of those times!!" He also implied that failure to learn might result in serious...

Change My Heart, O Lord

The song “Change my heart, O Lord; make me ever new” is occasionally sung in my prayers much differently, “Change my life circumstances, O Lord; make me more comfortable”. It would seem so much simpler for the difficult situations of my life to...

The Perfect Work of Patience

I am an impatient man. I made a career choice that only encouraged my impatience. The atmosphere of immediacy in emergency medicine intensified my unwillingness to wait. Practicing patience has been an issue since I was a young boy. My mother said that cooking was not...

The Restoration Project

In 1904 London-based Gresham Life Assurance Company began construction of its foreign headquarters, the Gresham Palace. This beautifully extravagant example of Art Nouveau architecture was located in the heart of Budapest, Hungary on the Danube River. However, the...

No Rule Book, No Lines, No Joy

Imagine a game of tennis without the lines. Just throw the rule book out the window. The way I play tennis, the temptation to do just that is strong! However, without the lines, the game of tennis loses its meaning and subsequently its joy. No rulebook, no lines, and...