As I write this I’m just a few days into my Orthopedic residency and it already seems ages cause the days feel longer and the nights shorter than in my days of freedom. Paradigm shift is one phrase which aptly describes my predicament which among others involves the hospital becoming my first home and my hostel room an unaffordable luxury!
In the past few days, I’ve journeyed through different stages of sleep deprivation and starvation not to mention the crankiness and frustration that builds up alongside. I discovered that I’ve an uncanny knack of catching up for the lost sleep: I can literally nod off while standing, doze off while talking to someone, snooze and then drool over my history sheets which I decorate with my illegible handwriting! Apart from my sleep (mis)adventures I realized that my entire days schedule would be dictated by someone, at times I’d be expected to run errands like a headless robot! And this is just the beginning of an arduous journey.
But through all of it this a beautiful realization dawned that I had to be broken to be made into something more beautiful. He is the Potter and I’m the clay, the process may be painful, the furnace unbearable and the way unfathomable but the end product is definitely beautiful. I’ve tasted and seen that His grace is enough. Like apostle Paul I can say, “whatever I’ve, wherever I’m, I can make it through anything in the One who makes me who I am” (Phil 4). As I sleep-walked through the hospital corridors at unearthly hours I found myself singing songs of praise. I’ve seen the miracle that happens when Christ displaces the worries at the center of our lives.
I’m reminded of a song:
“In the dark, in the light,
In the morning and night
In the good, in the hurt,
In the places I hide
When I rise, when I fall,
You’ll be there through it all
At the start, at the end
In the center of, the center of it”
Center of it by Chris August
joyancejames 